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Rumsfeld Scraps Visit To Germany Over Abu Ghraib War Crimes Probe

01.25.05 (6:04 am) [edit]

[b]Rummy (the Scumball) Rumsfeld should be fired and put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity:--[/b]

MUNICH — Due to Germany’s refusal to halt a law suit against him, United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he will not take part at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, in February, according to Expatica.

The lawsuit, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights in December with the Federal German Prosecutor’s Office, accuses Rumsfeld of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The organization alleges violations of German legislation, which outlaws war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide independent of the place of crime or origin of the accused,

With The Center for Constitutional Rights, four Iraqis tortured in U.S. custody filed the complaint against Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet, and eight other senior military and civilian officials over abuses at Abu Ghraib and in Iraq.

The organization said it had turned to German prosecutors “as a court of last resort” because the U.S. government “is unwilling to open an independent investigation” and had “refused to join the International Criminal Court,” according to Expatica. - http://www.iconoclast-texas.c...

Rumsfeld Scraps Visit To Germany Over Abu Ghraib War Crimes Probe

01.25.05 (6:02 am) [edit]

Kofi Annan Says: World 'Must Learn from Holocaust' ...

01.24.05 (2:46 pm) [edit]

[b]UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has urged the world to make sure evils such as those perpetrated in the Holocaust are never repeated[/b].

"We rightly say, 'Never again'. But action is much harder," he told the UN.

The General Assembly gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in a special session.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor, also addressed the meeting in New York.

Mr Annan said the United Nations, which was founded shortly after the end of World War II, must do everything in its power to prevent the scale of the slaughter undertaken by Nazi Germany.

"Two thirds of all Europe's Jews, including 1.5 million children, were murdered. An entire civilisation, which had contributed far beyond its numbers to the cultural and intellectual riches of Europe and the world, was uprooted, destroyed, laid waste," Mr Annan said.

"Truly it has been said: 'all that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing'."

He noted that Roma (Gypsies), Poles and other Slavs, Soviet prisoners of war, and mentally and physically disabled people "were likewise massacred in cold blood".

"Groups as disparate as Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals, as well as political opponents and many writers and artists, were treated with appalling brutality," he said.

[b]'Modern failures' [/b]

But Mr Annan admitted that taking action against genocide was much more difficult than repeating rhetoric.

"The world has, to its shame, failed more than once to prevent or halt genocide - for instance in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and in the former Yugoslavia," he said.

He said "terrible things" were happening now in Sudan's western region of Darfur, and action was needed.

On Tuesday, Mr Annan is due to receive the findings of an international panel investigating the atrocities in Darfur.

Once the Security Council has the report, it will have to decide how to act, Mr Annan said.

Death camp survivor Mr Wiesel, whom Mr Annan described as a "dear friend", said he feared the lessons of Auschwitz had already been lost.

"If the world had listened we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," Mr Wiesel told the 191-nation assembly.

"We know that for the dead it is too late... but it is not too late for today's children, ours and yours."

[b]'Barbaric'[/b]

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said no-one would ever know if the UN could have prevented the Holocaust.

But he said the UN and each member state needed "to re-dedicate ourselves to ensuring that it will never happen again".

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called the Holocaust "barbaric".

"For my country it signifies the absolute moral abomination, a denial of all things civilised without precedent or parallel," he told the assembly.

A worldwide week of events to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz began on Monday in the Austrian capital, Vienna, with UN officials honouring the victims. - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/am...

Torturing the Truth: Did AG Nominee Gonzales Help Bush Keep His DUI Quiet?

01.24.05 (10:54 am) [edit]

Senate Democrats put off a vote on White House counsel Alberto Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general, complaining he had provided evasive answers to questions about torture and the mistreatment of prisoners. But Gonzales's most surprising answer may have come on a different subject: his role in helping President Bush escape jury duty in a drunken-driving case involving a dancer at an Austin strip club in 1996. The judge and other lawyers in the case last week disputed a written account of the matter provided by Gonzales to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It's a complete misrepresentation," said David Wahlberg, lawyer for the dancer, about Gonzales's account.

Bush's summons to serve as a juror in the drunken-driving case was, in retrospect, a fateful moment in his political career: by getting excused from jury duty he was able to avoid questions that would have required him to disclose his own 1976 arrest and conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) in Kennebunkport, Maine—an incident that didn't become public until the closing days of the 2000 campaign. (Bush, who had publicly declared his willingness to serve, had left blank on his jury questionnaire whether he had ever been "accused" in a criminal case.)

Asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy to describe "in detail" the only court appearance he ever made on behalf of Bush, Gonzales—who was then chief counsel to the Texas governor—wrote that he had accompanied Bush the day he went to court "prepared to serve on a jury." While there, Gonzales wrote, he "observed" the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from the jury panel "to which the prosecutor did not object." Asked by the judge whether he had "any views on this," Gonzales recalled, he said he did not.

While Gonzales's account tracks with the official court transcript, it leaves out a key part of what happened that day, according to Travis County Judge David Crain. In separate interviews, Crain—along with Wahlberg and prosecutor John Lastovica—told NEWSWEEK that, before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge's chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to "consider" striking Bush from the jury, making the novel "conflict of interest" argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar's), the judge said. "He [Gonzales] raised the issue," Crain said.

Crain said he found Gonzales's argument surprising, since it was "extremely unlikely" that a drunken-driving conviction would ever lead to a pardon petition to Bush. But "out of deference" to the governor, Crain said, the other lawyers went along. Wahlberg said he agreed to make the motion striking Bush because he didn't want the hard-line governor on his jury anyway. But there was little doubt among the participants as to what was going on. "In public, they were making a big show of how he was prepared to serve," said Crain. "In the back room, they were trying to get him off."

Gonzales last week refused to waver. "Judge Gonzales has no recollection of requesting a meeting in chambers," a senior White House official said, adding that while Gonzales did recall that Bush's potential conflict was "discussed," he never "requested" that Bush be excused. "His answer to the Senate's question is accurate," the official said. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Herr Fuhrer Bush Pulls 'Neocon' Nazis Out of their Slimy Shadows

01.23.05 (5:41 am) [edit]

In the unending struggle over American foreign policy that consumes much of official Washington, one side claimed a victory this week: the neoconservatives, that determined band of hawkish idealists who promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq and now seek to bring democracy to the rest of the Middle East.

For more than a year, since the occupation of Iraq turned into the Bush administration's biggest headache, many of the "neocons" have lowered their profiles and muted their rhetoric. During President Bush's reelection campaign, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the leading voices for invading Iraq, virtually disappeared from public view.

But on Thursday, Bush proclaimed in his inaugural address that the central purpose of his second term would be the promotion of democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" — a key neoconservative goal. Suddenly, the neocons were ascendant again.

"This is real neoconservatism," said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar who has been a leading exponent of neocon thinking — and who sometimes has criticized the administration for not being neocon enough. "It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong."

On the other side of the Republican foreign policy divide, a leading "realist" — an exponent of the view that promoting democracy is nice, but not the central goal of U.S. foreign policy — agreed.

"If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that reveres the less idealistic policies of Richard Nixon. "I hope and pray that he didn't mean it … [and] that it was merely an inspirational speech, not practical guidance for the conduct of foreign policy."

A senior Bush aide who met with reporters Friday to explain the meaning of the speech waved away a question about its endorsement of neoconservative ideas. "I've never understood what that neoconservative label means, anyway," he said, refusing to be identified by name because, he said: "We should be focusing on the president's words, not mine."

But the aide went on to repeat, with emphasis, some of Bush's words that put democratization of other countries at the center of his foreign policy. "It is a top priority for his second term," the aide said. "He's raised the emphasis. He's raised the profile…. He's made it clear that he's going to turn up the pressure a bit. He's going to try to accelerate the process."

The administration would begin unveiling specific steps to increase the pressure for democracy in undemocratic countries, the Bush aide said, but he refused to describe any at this point.

At her confirmation hearings this week, Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice named six countries as "outposts of tyranny" that would get special attention from the second-term Bush administration: Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe.

On Friday, the senior official who briefed reporters said the administration also would be pressing friendly regimes to institute democratic reforms; he mentioned Russia, China, Pakistan and Egypt "as illustrations." Much of the pressure, he said, would be private rather than public, and the administration would be careful to avoid undermining a leader like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whom it counts as a democratic reformer.

Another senior official — a prominent neoconservative who also refused to be named — said Bush's theme reflected several "lessons learned" in the last 30 years. Chief among them, he said, was an argument that neoconservatives often made about the Soviet Union and, more recently, Iraq: that a central goal of the United States should be "systemic change" — changing hostile states' regimes, not merely their policies.

Still, he cautioned, "A policy promoting democracy also has to be a realistic policy…. We have to consider … what are the risks of overly rapid change? What's the downside?"

The definition of neoconservatism has been hotly debated in recent years as the neocon camp has grown in numbers and influence. One of the movement's fathers, Irving Kristol, once defined it — in contrast to traditional conservatism — as "forward-looking, not nostalgic … cheerful, not grim." In domestic affairs, he wrote, neocons tend to accept the need for a strong federal government, not a weak one.

In foreign policy, they believe in a broad definition of the national interest, not a narrow one; they are more willing than most traditional conservatives to commit American power, including military power, to such causes as democracy and human rights.

"Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces," Kristol wrote in 2003. "No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary."

Ronald Reagan, who committed the United States to help anti-communist "freedom fighters" in countries from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, often has been described as the most neoconservative president — until now. Nixon, who was equally anti-communist but who sought diplomatic agreements with communist powers like Russia and China, was the leading realist.

Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, fell squarely into Nixon's realist tradition; when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1990, he sought to slow down the process for the sake of stability, not speed it up. The elder Bush's top foreign policy advisor, Brent Scowcroft, occasionally has been acidly critical of the younger Bush's more adventurous policies; on Friday, Scowcroft refused to comment on Bush's inaugural speech. "He's in enough trouble already," an associate said.

The president has not always been as much of a neocon as his speech Thursday suggested. When he first ran for president in 2000, Rice, then his top foreign policy advisor, wrote an article promising that Bush would pursue a modest, limited foreign policy, and criticized the attempts at democratization and "nation-building" of the Democratic administration of President Clinton.

But after Sept. 11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, Bush was drawn progressively toward the neoconservative view that the only way to stop terrorism in the long run was to bring democracy, first to the Middle East, and in Thursday's speech, to the entire world.

As they drafted the speech this month, White House political aide Karl Rove and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson held a two-hour seminar with a panel of foreign policy scholars, including several leading neocons — newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University and Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institution — according to a person who was present.

Another sign of the administration's bent: Several of the leading realists of the first term, notably Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his closest aides, have left. But leading neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz, are staying. And at least one, National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams, is said to be in line for a more prominent job at the State Department or NSC. - http://fairuse.1accesshost.co...

BUSH'S FAILURE: -Go Home Yanks-, Says PM in Waiting

01.23.05 (5:38 am) [edit]

THE Shi’ite Muslim cleric tipped to become prime minister after next Sunday’s election in Iraq has said it will be the duty of the new government to demand the withdrawal of American forces “as soon as possible”.

“No people in the world accepts occupation and nor do we accept the continuation of American troops in Iraq,” said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

“We regard these forces to have committed many mistakes in the handling of various issues, the first and foremost being that of security, which in turn has contributed to the massacres, crimes and calamities that have taken place in Iraq against the Iraqis.”

In comments certain to raise eyebrows in the United States, al-Hakim spoke of a role for Iran and Syria — both regarded in Washington as enemies in the war on terror — along with Iraq’s other neighbours, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, in the security of the country.

“These countries have past experiences and good security forces and with good relations we can solve this problem together,” he said.

“Should the security problem continue, it will not end at the border of Iraq but extend to their countries.”

Al-Hakim, who heads a list of 228 candidates representing the United Iraqi Alliance — a coalition of the main Shi’ite factions — refused to be drawn into specifying a timetable for American withdrawal, saying that the details had to be worked out after the election.

However, speaking slowly and emphatically, he added: “Iraq can rely on itself and its people and it does not want foreign troops in its country.”

President George W Bush’s administration has said that an Iraqi request for the removal of the 173,000 American and other foreign troops in the country would be honoured but declined to give any indication of timing.

Britain does not want to keep troops in Iraq for “a moment longer than we need to”, the Foreign Office said yesterday. “It’s a matter of staying sufficiently long for the Iraqis to be sufficiently robust to achieve security.”

The powerful alliance headed by al-Hakim was formed on the initiative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered spiritual leader. It is expected to win a majority of seats in the 275-member transitional national assembly, from which the prime minister will be chosen.

The election is being boycotted by most Sunni political parties, both secular and religious. Although outnumbered by the Shi’ite majority, the Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein but will emerge from the election with their influence sharply reduced.

Bush has heralded the election as the first test of his hopes for the spread of democracy to the Middle East but the administration appears increasingly concerned about the Shi’ite-dominated government that it is now expected to produce.

Further cause for pessimism has emerged with an American intelligence report warning that the elections will be followed by more violence, with an increased likelihood of clashes between Shi’ites and Sunnis that could lead to civil war.

It is all a far cry from Bush’s earlier vision of a secular Iraq that would become a crucial ally in the Middle East.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...,,2089-1452397,00.html

"No neocons need apply"...

01.21.05 (5:33 am) [edit]

David Frum is complaining about a sign posted prominently outside the entrance to the Department of State -- No Neocons Need Apply:

"[i]The story is going around Washington that Senate Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar handed Condoleezza Rice a list of names of 'neocons' he wanted blacklisted from the Department of State and that Rice assented[/i]."

Thrilling, if true. The war the neocons wanted is proving to be their undoing, and it isn't just the Democrats in Congress who are sickened by the fact that these hornets are still buzzing around the picnic table, diving at scraps. A good dose of bug-repellant is sorely needed.

How long will it be, I wonder, before Senator Lugar finds himself under attack for once having eaten a falafel with ties to terrorist groups, or it is suddenly discovered that Condi is a secret member of the Nation of Islam?

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P1674" title="http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P1674" target="_blank"http://www.antiwar.com/blog/i...

Oh I doubt that, Condi lusts for war 'cause she doesn't "get any" anywhere else... Unless it's from her "husband" Bush???...

"When last year she referred to Bush as 'my husband' it was a Freudian slip that reflected how close Rice and the Bush clan have become. When it comes to Rice, the little girl from Birmingham who now bestrides the world stage, she really is part of the family." ... Does that make Bush a bigamist???
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa...,12271,1391579,00.html

YOU ARE PAYING BIG $$$ FOR MAD KING GEORGE'S "CORONATION" ORGIES!!!

01.20.05 (8:41 am) [edit]

TAKE A LOOK AT: "The Crowning of Bush: The Lavish Inaugural Will Cost You a Lot" http://www.tblog.com/template...

TAKE A LOOK AT: "Inauguration: Lifestyles of the Rich and Heartless" http://www.tblog.com/template...

TAKE A LOOK AT: Inaugural sets the tone/theme ... TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! http://www.vheadline.com/read...

[b]Critics Attack Inauguration's Cost[/b]

Estimates on the cost of the Bush inauguration have wavered in the $30 million to $40 million range, maybe as high as $50 million for three or four days of events.

That’s about what it costs the administration to execute the war in Iraq for about five hours. Or how much the Harley-Davidson Motor Company has raised since 1980 to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Or how much AT&T will gain from increased consumer basic rate phone fees per month as of the first of the year.

The inauguration festivities will be supported by private donations from oil companies, insurance companies, investment and mortgage companies and other companies that will be opening up their checkbooks out of the goodness of their hearts, expecting nothing in return, just looking for a chance to jitterbug at any one of nine balls in the nation’s capital, watch fireworks displays, listen to a youth concert, see a parade — and, oh yeah, there’s a swearing-in ceremony, too.

Organizers say the festivities would have a solemnity missing from other inaugurals because the country remains at war.

“There have been 55 inaugurations and very few have taken place during wartime, and this inaugural will reflect that,” said Steve Schmidt, spokesman for the inaugural committee.

Part of that “solemnity” will likely come at the Commander-in-Chief Ball, a new event this time around.

It will be free of charge to 2,000 members of the armed services and their families, featuring those who have recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, or those who will be deployed there soon.

Don’t get too comfortable, taxpayer; you will be paying something. How about a little thing called security?

The $40 million for the inaugural gala doesn’t include the cost of security. While the string quartets fiddle, ball-goers can look at the windows and see evidence of millions being spent for security.

The District of Columbia anticipates spending $8.8 million in overtime pay for about 2,000 D.C. police officers; $2.7 million to pay 1,000-plus officers being sent by other jurisdictions across the country; $3 million to construct reviewing stands; and $2.5 million to place public works, health, transportation, fire, emergency management and business services on emergency footing.

Officials in the District of Columbia aren’t happy about this either, considering they say they will have to pay about $12 million of that bill from their local Homeland Security Fund (also known as tax dollars).

The District was not successful in getting extra money from Congress last year to increase their security coffers, obviously having less pull than New York and Boston, cities which got $50 million each to cover costs of the GOP and Democratic national conventions.

And by the way, federal employees in the District and Virginia environs are entitled to a holiday on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. This day off is estimated to cost about $66 million.

They will probably get a half-day on Jan. 19 as roadblocks and other security precautions get started. Of course, this conspicuous consumption takes a back seat to the amounts of money America and its people are pouring into tsunami relief.

As close as we can tell from research, private U.S. donations alone have topped the $200 million mark, apart from the $350 million pledged by the government to date. You can spend a dollar on bread or spend it on whisky.

That’s the nature of mankind and the marketplace. But how much more George W. Bush could impress us all if he just met the Supreme Court Chief near the Capitol at noon on Jan. 20, said the oath, and then went back to his office and made a televised speech to all of us.

http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=2833413&nav=EyAzVOr H" title="http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=2833413&nav=EyAzVOr H" target="_blank"http://www.katc.com/Global/st...

While Others Bleed, Mad King Bushy Sits There With Dumb Smirk on Stupid Face!!!

01.20.05 (8:23 am) [edit]

Mad King Bushy sits on his fat ass with a dumb smirk on his stupid face while others die in his illegal & immoral war in Iraq based on LIES, LIES, LIES & MORE LIES. And while millions are suffering horribly in Asia as a result of the Tsunami. Not to worry, the dumb-fuck is going to enjoy the most lavish "coronation" in our nation's history- in defiance of our democratic traditions. Bush isn't fit to wipe toilets in Wal Mart. His asinine screed made me wan to puke: 4 more years of world-wide wars by the neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks killing tens of thousands "to free 'em" and enrich Halliburton; while our own economy is exploited to make these mother fuckers RICH, RICH, RICH & MORE RICH!

[b]Take a look at [/b] http://www.tblog.com/template...

World Fears New Bush Era ... So Do I: The Asshole Is Vomitting Fascist Crap!!!

01.20.05 (8:17 am) [edit]

[b]Are you listening to Bush's screed? It's alot of fascist crap about us invading other nations to spread "freedom" (i.e. corporate rape world-wide). Meanwhile, we don't have any health care for 45 million of our citizens- poverty is skyrocketing- and our economy is going down the toilet. 4 more years of WAR![/b]

[i]Blair urges more consensual US approach as poll shows unease in 18 out of 21 nations [/i]

George Bush will be sworn in as president of the United States for a second term today in a lavish Washington ceremony, amid mounting international concern that his new administration will make the world a more dangerous place.

A poll of 21 countries published yesterday - reflecting opinion in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe - showed that a clear majority have grave fears about the next four years.

Fifty-eight per cent of the 22,000 who took part in the poll, commissioned by the BBC World Service, said they expected Mr Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, compared with only 26% who considered him a positive force.

The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general.

Tony Blair, in an interview with the Guardian, expressed hope that Mr Bush's second term would prove to be more consensual than the first.

[b]More[/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

DEBUNKING THE BUSHIES' LIES:-- U.S. Found No Evidence WMD Moved From Iraq

01.18.05 (9:03 am) [edit]

[b]No signs that weapons were smuggled, intelligence officials say[/b]

As the hunt for weapons of mass destruction dragged on unsuccessfully in Iraq, top Bush administration officials speculated publicly that the banned armaments may have been smuggled out of the country before the war started.

Whether Saddam Hussein moved the WMD — deadly chemical, biological or radiological arms — is one of the unresolved issues that the final U.S. intelligence report on Iraq’s programs is expected to address next month.

But intelligence and congressional officials say they have not seen any information — never “a piece,” said one — indicating that WMD or significant amounts of components and equipment were transferred from Iraq to neighboring Syria, Jordan or elsewhere.

[b]Search draws to a close[/b]

The administration acknowledged last week that the search for banned weapons is largely over. The Iraq Survey Group’s chief, Charles Duelfer, is expected to submit the final installments of his report in February. A small number of the organization’s experts will remain on the job in case new intelligence on Iraqi WMD is unearthed.

But the officials familiar with the search say U.S. authorities have found no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein transferred WMD or related equipment out of Iraq.

A special adviser to the CIA director, Duelfer declined an interview request through an agency spokesman. In his last public statements, he told a Senate panel last October that it remained unclear whether banned weapons could have been moved from Iraq.

“What I can tell you is that I believe we know a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points,” he said. “But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say.”

Last week, a congressional official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said suggestions that weapons or components were sent from Iraq were based on speculation stemming from uncorroborated information.

White House pushed smuggling theory
President Bush and top-raking officials in his administration used the existence of WMD in Iraq as the main justification for the March 2003 invasion, and throughout much of last year the White House continued to raise the possibility the weapons were transferred to another country.

[b]For instance:[/b]

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in early October he believed Saddam had WMD before the war. “He has either hidden them so well or moved them somewhere else, or decided to destroy them ... in event of a conflict but kept the capability of developing them rapidly,” Rumsfeld said in a Fox News Channel interview.

Eight months earlier, he told senators “it’s possible that WMD did exist, but was transferred, in whole or in part, to one or more other countries. We see that theory put forward.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern the WMD would be found. However, when asked in September if the WMD could have been hidden or moved to a country like Syria, he said, “I can’t exclude any of those possibilities.”

And, on MSNBC’s “Hardball” in June, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said: “Everyone believed that his programs were more active than they appeared to be, but recognize, he had a lot of time to move stuff, a lot of time to hide stuff.”

[b]Claims subside[/b]

Since the October report from Duelfer, which said Saddam intended to obtain WMD but had no banned weapons, senior administration leaders have largely stopped discussing whether the weapons were moved.

Last week, the intelligence and congressional officials said evidence indicating somewhat common equipment with dual military and civilian uses, such as fermenters, was salvaged during post-invasion looting and sold for scrap in other countries. Syria was mentioned as one location.

However, the U.S. intelligence community’s 2002 estimate on Iraq indicated there were sizable weapons programs and stockpiles. The officials said weapons experts have not found a production capability in Iraq that would back up the size of the prewar estimates.

Among a series of key findings, that estimate said Iraq “has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged” during a 1998 U.S.-British bombing campaign and “has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.”

Although the U.S. had little specific information, the estimate also said Saddam probably stockpiled at least 100 metric tons, possibly 500 metric tons, of chemical weapons agents — “much of it added in the last year.” - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6...

Bush Fucked-Up Iraq-- Now He Wants To Fuck-Up Iran!!!!

01.17.05 (10:20 am) [edit]

[b]THE COMING WARS[/b]

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

* * * * * * *

For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-productio n technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)

The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.”

The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.”

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”

A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?”

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.”

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.”

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”

Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.”

* * * * * * *

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.”

The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.”

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)

“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.”

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.”

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”

[b]THE FULL STORY [/b] http://www.newyorker.com/fact...

"King" Bush Spends $50 Million on Coronation

01.16.05 (6:21 am) [edit]

It will be one of the biggest parties in American history, but half of the country will be left out. With a price tag of up to $50 million, President George W Bush's inauguration in 11 days' time will be an unashamed celebration of Red America's victory over Blue America in last November's election.

It is going to be the most expensive, most security-obsessed event in the history of Washington DC. An army of 10,000 police, secret service officers and FBI agents will patrol the capital for four days of massive celebrations that some critics have derided as reminiscent of the lavish shindigs thrown by Louis XIV, France's extravagant Sun King.

More than 150,000 people, nearly all Republicans whose tickets are a reward for election work, will pack the Mall to hear Bush take his oath of office on 20 January. There will be nine official balls, countless unofficial ones, parades and a concert hosted by Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara.

Amid the official pageantry will be many huge parties laid on by companies wishing to win favour with Washington's power players. Anyone who is anyone in Republican circles will be in town. Many Democrats will be leaving. With so many big names in one place, security measures will include road blocks, anti-aircraft guns guarding the skies and sniper teams patrolling the rooftops.

Many observers say it is all too much. 'We have elected a President who seems to have quite a monarchical role. It is a bit of a coronation,' said Larry Haas, a former official in Bill Clinton's White House.

Certainly, Bush's inauguration will be an orgy of gladhanding and partying by the Republican faithful from all over the country. One Washington hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, is offering visitors four nights in its Presidential Suite for $200,000. The price tag includes a 24-hour butler, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or Humvee, daily champagne and caviar and a flight to the hotel in a private jet.

One highlight of the bonanza is the Black Tie and Boots Ball organised by Bush's home state of Texas, with the President as star guest. Ten thousand tickets sold out in less than 50 minutes, and are now trading privately at $1,300 each. Another is the Commander-in-Chief's Ball where Bush will honour American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is billed as the centrepiece of the inauguration, which itself has a theme tinged with the idea of military service.

All the partying is being condemned by many commentators as in poor taste for a nation fighting a bloody war.

Carroll Wilson, editor of the Texas newspaper the Times Record, has called the cost obscene and 'a horrendous waste'. 'There's something inherently embarrassing about spending $50m on a party that will start and end in the blink of a very red eye,' he added.

The fighting in Iraq has provoked calls for the celebrations to be toned down, as they were during the two world wars when some were even cancelled. Bush's second inauguration will be the first in wartime since President Richard Nixon took office in 1969 during the Vietnam conflict.

Yet the partying is being intensified. The Commander-in-Chief's Ball is being hailed by organisers as a fitting tribute to American soldiers on active service. More than 2,000 troops and their partners, selected by the Pentagon, will take part. Most have served in Iraq or Afghanistan or are about to go there. The parades will have a stronger than normal military theme.

That angers many anti-war protesters who say the lavish celebration is inappropriate during conflict. Some conservative commentators have even joined the fray, contrasting the spending with a recent scandal over a shortage of armour for American soldiers and their vehicles.

A huge series of demonstrations is now being planned which organisers say will be much larger than the ones that marked Bush's first inauguration after the contested Florida recount in 2000. 'We want our voices to be heard,' said a spokesman for the Answer Coalition, which is co-ordinating the protests.

The huge security presence means there is likely to be little disruption, especially of the oath-taking ceremony itself. More vulnerable may be the corporate events taking place all over the city. The $50m bill is mostly being paid by private donations from people and firms currying political favour. With a strict ban on large single donations to active political campaigns, the inauguration offers a rare chance for companies and individuals to lavish large sums of money on the President and his party simultaneously.

The big donors are split into 'underwriters', who stumped up $250,000 each, and 'sponsors', who merely shelled out $100,000. Both gain access to a variety of events that will be attended by Bush. The donors are a familiar roster of Republican supporters and big business. They include firms in the President's former business, oil, such as Exxon Mobil and ChevronTexaco, former Enron president Richard Kinder and Texas oil baron Boone Pickens, who also gave $500,000 to the anti-John Kerry campaign of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Though the guests will be celebrating Bush's victory, some Washington insiders will also be keeping a keen eye on the jockeying for position that has already begun for the next election. 'The clock to 2008 starts ticking the second after Bush finishes his oath,' Haas said 'At that moment Republicans begin moving into position for that. Bush should enjoy his moment while he can.' - http://www.theexperiment.org/...

The Madness of George W. Bush

01.15.05 (6:29 pm) [edit]

[i][b]A reflection of our collective psychosis: Bush’s sickness is our own[/b][/i]

George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because it’s an illness that's in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it especially hard to diagnose.

Bush's malady is quite different from schizophrenia, for example, in which all the different parts of the personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a state of internal chaos. As compared to the disorder of the schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and can appear like such a "regular," normal guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to name Bush's illness ‘malignant egophrenic (as compared to schizophrenic) disease,’ or ‘ME disorder,’ for short. If ME disorder goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very destructive, particularly if the person is in a position of power.

In much the same way that a child's psychology cannot be understood without looking at the family system he or she is a part of, George Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view Bush and his entire Administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, etc), as well as the corporate, military industrial complex that they are co-dependently enmeshed with, the media that they control, the voters that support them, and ourselves as well, as interconnected parts of a whole system, or a "field." Instead of relating to any part of this field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the ‘medium’ though which malignant egophrenia manifests and propagates itself. ME disease is a field phenomenon, and needs to be contemplated as such. Bush's sickness is our own.

[b]THE DISEASE IS NON-LOCAL[/b]

Being a field phenomenon, malignant egophrenia is non-local in nature, which means that it is not bound by the limitations of time or space. Being non-local, this disease pervades and underlies the entire field and can therefore manifest anywhere, through anyone and at any moment. The disease's non-local nature makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it in potential. It is more a question of whether or not we are aware of our susceptibility to fall prey to the disease. This awareness itself serves as an immunization that protects us from the pernicious effects of the illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to others.

Bush, like all of us, is both a manifestation of this deeper field and simultaneously an agent effecting this field. He’s become so fully taken over by the disease, all the while not suspecting a thing, that he’s become a "carrier" for this deadly disease, thus infecting the field around him. He’s become a portal through which the field around him "warps" in such a way as to feed and support his pathogenic process. A non-local, reciprocally co-arising and interdependent field of unconscious denial and cover-up gets constellated around Bush to enable and protect his pathology. People who support Bush are actually complicit with and enabling Bush’s madness in a co-dependent, self-reinforcing feedback loop that is ‘closed,’ which is to say it is insular and not open to any feedback from the ‘real’ world.

Bush supporters are not merely disinterested in seeing that they are in denial of reality; on the contrary, they actively don’t want to look at this, which is to say they resist self-reflection at all costs. Bush and his supporters perversely interpret any feedback from the real world which reflects back their unconsciousness as itself evidence that proves the rightness of their viewpoint. All of Bush’s supporters mutually reinforce each other’s unconscious resistance to such a degree that a collective, interdependent field of impenetrability gets collectively conjured up by them that literally resists consciousness.

People who don't recognize Bush's illness and support him are unconsciously colluding with and enabling in the co-creation of the pathological field that is incarnating itself into the human family. People who support Bush become unwitting agents through which this non-local disease feeds and replicates itself. By supporting Bush they are collaborating with and becoming parts of the greater, interconnected and self-organizing field of the disease.

[b]ANALAGOUS TO GERMANS IN THE TIME OF HITLER[/b]

The situation is very analogous to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn't realize that the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia had taken possession of Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly disease to propagate itself. This was a collective psychosis, and this is what is taking place in our country right now.

This is exactly what C. G. Jung, one of the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, was warning us about when he said "The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche."

[b]THE LIE[/b]

It is not that the threat of terrorism is not real, but that Bush's policies in dealing with terrorism are actually fueling the fire. The way Bush is fighting terrorism is actually the very act which is invoking and creating more of it in the first place. It is as if he is fighting against his own shadow, which is a battle that can never be won. Bush is so dissociated from the darkness within himself that he splits off from it and tries to destroy it. Bush’s inner process, because of the position of power he finds himself in, is getting dreamed up and played out on the world stage.ME disease is unique in that it collapses the boundary between inner and outer. Egophrenia is an inner disease of the soul that expresses itself via the medium of the outside world. We could even say that the inner core of egophrenia actually in-forms and gives shape to the outer universe so as to express itself.

By creating more of the very thing he is fighting against, Bush is enacting the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul. In Bush’s case, it is the repetition compulsion gone awry, to daemonic proportions, getting acted out on the world stage. To quote noted psychologist Rollo May, the daemonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person [or whole nation].....the daemonic can be either creative or destructive [i.e, demonic].....violence is the daemonic gone awry."

The daemonic aspect of the disease develops a certain autonomy and literally possesses the person or group, as it is self-generating, self-perpetuating and self-organizing in nature, like a closed and negative feedback loop. The person who is taken over doesn't suspect a thing, as the field secretly conspires and colludes with and enables their psychosis. For example, Bush, in his delusion, imagines he is divinely guided. His supporters want to believe this to feed their own adolescent fantasies of wanting to have a divinely inspired leader to take care of and protect them. Because of this need they invest, so to speak, in Bush’s delusion, which just confirms to Bush all the more that he indeed is God’s instrument. Bush and his followers are co-dependently and reciprocally feeding and supporting each other’s unconscious narcissistic needs in a truly pathological, and ultimately self-destructive co-dependent relationship.

At the root of Bush's pathology is a deep dissociation. Like the terrorists, he has split-off from his own darker half, projecting the shadow ‘out there,’ and then tries to destroy this dis-owned shadow. By projecting the shadow onto each other, Bush and the terrorists are each seeing their own shadow reflected in the other. They see each other as criminals, as the incarnation of evil. By projecting the shadow like this, they locate the evil ‘out there,’ which insures that they don't have to recognize the evil within themselves. It's interesting to note that the inner meaning of the word 'mirror' is ’shadow holder.’ Ironically, by fighting against their own shadow in this way, they become possessed by the very thing they are trying to destroy, thereby perpetuating a never-ending cycle of violence. To quote Jung, "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided [not in touch with both the light AND dark parts of themselves] and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

Jung simply refers to projecting the shadow as “the lie." It’s interesting to note that one of the inner meanings of the word Devil is ‘the liar.’ Projecting the shadow, to quote Jung, "deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil." Jung stresses the importance of consciously developing what he calls our "imagination for evil," which is to consciously recognize our potential for evil. This recognition means embracing and integrating our dark side into our wholeness, which is made up of both light and dark. If we have no imagination for evil, to quote Jung, "evil has us in its grip.......for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil."

By projecting the shadow, Bush is unwittingly being a conduit for the deepest, archetypal evil to possess him from behind, beneath his conscious awareness, and to act itself out through him. At the same time, ironically enough, he identifies with the light and imagines that he is divinely inspired. To quote Jung, a person in a position of power who has become dissociated like Bush “even runs the grave risk of believing he has a Messianic mission, and forces tyrannous doctrines upon his fellow-beings.” He then believes that any action he desires is justified in the name of God, as he can rationalize it as being God's will. Unable to self-reflect, he is convinced of the rightness of his viewpoint, which he considers non-negotiable. This is a very dangerous situation, as Bush has become unconsciously identified with and possessed by the hero, or savior archetype. This figure is religious in nature, as it derives from the transpersonal, archetypal dimension of the collective unconscious. Being inflated with the hero archetype, he (archetypically) wants to save the world from evil and to liberate the planet.

This is the height of irony since, in reality, Bush is acting as an unwitting conduit for evil by instigating wars and taking away people's freedoms. This incongruity brings into bold relief the severe schizoid split that characterizes Bush's condition. His inflation blinds him to the real consequences of his actions and is one of the easier-to-recognize aspects of his pathology. Being inflated due to an unconscious identification with an archetype is, in essence, an expression of having forfeited one's humanity, a state in which humility becomes impossible.

Bush has fallen into a state that is the embodiment of arrogance. Succumbing to the temptation of power, Bush has become corrupt, which is the inevitable consequence when one prefers power over truth. He has fallen into a vicious cycle where he has become addicted to power. Bush and his regime are compulsively driven to do everything and anything they can to hold onto the position of power they find themselves in. Not only do they not see the depraved nature of the situation they have fallen into, they don't want to see it. Being in the role of having power, there is a counter-incentive to self-reflect, which just reinforces the strength of the pathogen.

The inner name of ME disease is ‘Mad Emperor’ disease, as it is what happens when a person in a position of power falls prey to and become seduced by that power. As Al Gore points out, people who are after dominance and power “satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens--sooner or later--to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.”

At the root of Bush’s process is an unwillingness and seeming inability to experience his own sense of sin, guilt and shame, as if he is afraid of being exposed, of being found out. He’s clearly unable to feel any remorse and experience his own weakness and vulnerability, his own sense of failure. This threatens his narcissism too much. One aspect of Bush’s pathology is ‘malignant narcissism,’ as he reacts sadistically to others who mirror back his guilt and don’t support and enable his narcissism.

This inability to experience his shame and guilt sets in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of denial, cover-up and projecting the shadow, all of which are based on a lie. Bush then falls into an endless loop of hiding from his own lie, which is to say, from himself. This process allows Bush to become a conduit for egophrenia to take him over and incarnate its malignant aspect through him.

Jung comments on this resistance to self-reflection and endless cycle of self- deception by saying "Hysterical self-deceivers, and ordinary ones too, have at all times understood the art of misusing everything so as to avoid the demands and duties of life, and above all to shirk the duty of confronting themselves. They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists."

Falling victim to one's own deception as Bush has can have a very mesmerizing and gripping effect on others, as he appears so convinced of what he is saying and is able to project this conviction. To quote Jung, "Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself, or an evil deed or intention whose righteousness one regards as self-evident.....things only become dangerous when the pathological liar is taken seriously by a wider public. Like Faust, he is bound to make a pact with the devil and thus slips off the straight path.” Bush has the seductive coherence of someone who is fanatically identified, like the typical fundamentalist, with only one side of an inherently two-sided polarity. Thomas Merton, commenting on the case of the obviously demented Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, points out "One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane."

A key feature of malignant egophrenia is that it is very hard to recognize when someone is a carrier, because the person can seem so normal and even endearing. The person afflicted can be very ‘charming’ and have a certain type of charisma that can entrance those who don't see through their subterfuge. Concerned about nothing other than himself, a person stricken with egophrenia is in reality indifferent to other people’s suffering, all the while professing his compassion, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Just like Hitler struck a chord deep in the German unconscious, Bush is touching something very deep in the American psyche. Bush is acting out on the world stage an under-developed psychological process that deals simplistically with issues such as good and evil. It’s as if he hasn't grown out of and fully differentiated from the realm of mythic, archetypal fantasy that is typical of early adolescence. This immature aspect of Bush's process speaks to and resonates with those voters who support him, as it is a reflection of their own under-developed inner process.

Whereas Hitler’s evil was more overt in its cruelty and sadism, Bush’s dark side is much more hidden and disguised, which makes it particularly dangerous. People who voted for Bush are somehow blind to what is very obvious to others. It’s as if they’ve become hypnotized and fallen under the spell that Bush is casting. Why would people vote for someone stricken with malignant egophrenia? People who support Bush are suggestible and susceptible to the same malady that Bush is embodying, as if they have a predisposition for it (based on their own trauma, dissociated psyche and tendency to project the shadow). Supporting Bush is a sign that a person not only doesn't see the deadly illness that is incarnating itself through Bush, but is an expression that this disease has taken up residence in their being and is using them to do its bidding.

[b]A COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS[/b]

It is a very dangerous situation we are in--because of the position of power Bush and the religious right find themselves in, they can literally dream up and create the very apocalypse that they are imagining is prophesized, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a perversely self-reinforcing feedback-loop, the more death and destruction happens, the more this confirms to them the truth that their deluded end-time scenario is actually happening as prophesized. In a diabolical self-validating vicious cycle, Bush and the religious right are ignoring the role they are playing in creating exactly what they are using as evidence to prove the rightness of their viewpoint. ME disease is a world where up is down, as its flawless illogic is convoluted and inverted at its core.

Malignant egophrenia is crazy-making. It induces a very hard-to-recognize form of insanity. When we fall prey to egophrenia, we are unable to recognize that we are taken over, as we become bewitched by our own projections, accusing other people of doing what we ourselves are doing. For example, Bush is talking about himself when he accuses Saddam Hussein of being “a man who has defied the world,” and “a man who has made the United Nations look foolish.” Part of the disease is that when we point at it and call it by its true name--as being a form of insanity called ignorance--people who are stricken with the disease will see us as the ones who are crazy. Unless we recognize the insidious nature of this disease, there is a crazy-making field around it that will make us a part of itself. Collective psychosis is like that.

There is only one reason why the mainstream psychiatric community is not studying this contagious psychosis as it spreads through Bush, his regime, and the surrounding field. They are not studying this disease because they haven't yet recognized that the disease even exists. To the extent that any of us are unaware that this non-local pathogen pervades the field we become hooked by it through our own unconscious blind-spot. By not recognizing the nature of the disease, the mental health community becomes its unwitting agents, helping the disease to propagate. What clearer sign do we need of a collective psychosis than when our mental health system itself, whose job it is to monitor such phenomena, not only doesn't recognize that there is a collective psychosis running rampant in our society, but are themselves infected with it?

The DSM-IV, the psychiatric diagnostic manual, is continually expanding and including new diagnoses as we deepen our understanding of and map the contours of the human psyche. The problem is that the DSM-IV is an expression of an ‘old paradigm’ way of thinking in that it looks at mental illness as it exists in individuals, regarding the individual as an object existing separate from the field around them. This is based on an illusion, for the individual is embedded in the greater field (family system, society, and planetary culture) and is an expression of this multi-textured field. The individual and the field around them interpenetrate and condition each other so fully that they can't even be regarded as two separate aspects that have become joined together, but rather must be seen as inseparable parts of a greater whole. Egophrenia expresses itself non-locally throughout the entire field. Consequently, instead of being viewed through the lens of the fragmented, separate self, it requires a more holistic vision that recognizes the existence of the interdependently co-arising field. It’s not a question of integrating ME disease into the existing DSM-IV, but instead of radically expanding, up-leveling and re-visioning our understanding of the nature of illness itself.

It is profoundly important that the mental health community at large recognize this age-old disease with which we are all afflicted. Doing this changes this community from being part of the problem to part of the solution. The disease literally feeds on our unawareness of it. The recognition of the disease is itself the beginning of the cure. By recognizing the nature of this collective psychosis, we snap out of being part of it. Malignant egophrenia, unrecognized and misdiagnosed until now, has wreaked havoc all throughout human history, and is at the very root of our current world crisis. To the extent we are unaware of the nature of this collective psychosis, it has us in its grips and will unconsciously get acted out through us in a destructive manner. The choice is truly ours.

One of the signatures of ME disease is that it hooks people through their unconscious blind-spot, so when people are afflicted by this deadly disease they are truly asleep to what is getting acted out through them. Bush himself is being manipulated, used and victimized, like a puppet on a string, by a deeper matrix of cover-up and deceit that has been perpetrated by him and his very regime, and has now taken on an autonomous life of its own. This disease, if it gets out of control, means self-destruction for both victim and perpetrator. There are no winners. The entire interconnected web that supports Bush can be recognized to be tentacles of this virulent, non-local pathogen that, to the extent that it is not seen, is potentially gaining more and more sovereignty. Like a sci-fi movie, we have dreamed up a higher-dimensional Frankenstein monster that has taken on a life of its own and truly threatens all of us.

[b]THE IMPORTANCE OF NAMING THE DISEASE[/b]

Malignant egophrenia is both an expression of and at the root of the extreme polarization and dissociation in both the human psyche and the world process at large. The disease is archetypal in nature, which is to say that it has eternally re-created itself and played itself out over the course of history. We can even say that it’s the ‘bug’ in the system that has in-formed and given shape to all of the conflict and disharmony of human relationship. ME disease is as old as the human species. However, we’re now at the point in our evolution where we can finally recognize it, see it, give it a name and diagnose it.

Malignant egophrenia is truly diabolical in nature and is what the ancient, indigenous cultures would call a demon. Jung warned us that a difficult task lay ahead of us after the mass insanity of the second World War. He points out that after the ‘demons’ abandoned the German people, these negative energies weren't banished. To quote Jung, "the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey." Projecting the shadow literally opens the door for malignant egophrenia to take up residence in our being.

What the ancient people called 'demons,' Jung calls 'autonomous complexes,' which are split-off parts of the psyche that can possess a person and seemingly develop an independent will and quasi-life of their own. These autonomous complexes can't stand to be seen in much the same way a vampire can't stand the light. Malignant egophrenia will shape-shift and do everything in its power to resist being seen. It’s elusive, mercurial and very much a trickster.The disease obfuscates itself, creating any number of distractions to hide behind, and will even react violently to being seen, for being seen takes away its omnipotence and autonomy.

When we see a demon we know its name. Naming it is exorcistic, as it dis-spells the demon's power over us. To name something is to symbolize it. The word ‘symbolic,’ which meansthat which unites,' is the antidote and antonym to the word ‘diabolic,’ which means that which divides and separates. George Bush claimed to be "a uniter, not a divider." However, he has only united one thing--the entire world against us. To see this diabolical aspect of what is coming through Bush, namely, that he is an instrument that is creating separation, is itself to be seeing with symbolic awareness.

Naming the disease, we are able to (alchemically) contain it, so that it can't possess us from behind and act itself out through us unconsciously. Once the disease is named, it’s anchored to consciousness so that it can't vaporize back into the unconscious. This de-potentiates the disease, beginning the process of re-integrating it back into the profound unity of the psyche. The energy that was bound up in the compulsion to endlessly re-create the disease becomes liberated and available for creative expression. The prescription for this disease is simply for enough of us who see it to connect with each other in lucid awareness so that it can be contained, metabolized and healed. We can put our collective realization together and dream a much more grace-filled universe into incarnation. This is an evolutionary impulse from the universe in which we are invited to participate.

Encoded in the disease is its own medicine. Hidden in the daemonic is our guiding spirit, our true genius and inner voice. This is why Jung calls the daemonic the "not yet made real creative." The fact that such a dark shadow is emerging in our world is an expression that light is nearby, as shadows are themselves an expression of light. Demons are actually blessings in drag. Lucifer is truly the bringer of light.

[b]A MODERN DAY PLAGUE OF EGYPT[/b]

Malignant egophrenia is manifesting itself, both literally and symbolically, hidden yet visible for all who have eyes to see, simultaneously veiling and revealing itself. Symbolically encoded in egophrenia's literal manifestation is the key to its re-solution. Symbols are the language of dreams. A symbol brings together and reconciles two contraries into a greater whole. A symbol reflects and effects a change in and of consciousness itself. A symbol is both the expression of as well as the doorway into a more transcendent, higher-dimensional part of ourselves.

People don't see egophrenia because they don't recognize the symbolic dimension of existence, but rather are absorbed in the literal dimension of reality. It is very convincing to (only) take things literally and see these literal facts as "the (one) truth," as events in this world are literally happening. They're as real as real can be. This can be very entrancing, particularly with the evidence right in front of our face. People are dying. Seeing symbolically doesn't negate the literal dimension but instead complements and completes it, as both are true simultaneously. The literal and symbolic dimensions of reality interpenetrate each other so fully that they can't be seen as two separate things that are joined together, but rather are interdependent parts of a greater whole. The birth of symbolic awareness not only more fully completes our picture of the nature of the universe we live in, but gives us access to the way to actually deal with this deadly disease. Egophrenia is truly initiatory, as it is a wake-up call to symbolic awareness, which is a higher dimension of our being. All that is needed for malignant egophrenia to reveal its blessing is for us to recognize its revelatory function.

Jung says, "Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered." Malignant egophrenia is a modern-day plague of Egypt. If we don't see what it is symbolically revealing to us, malignant egophrenia will destroy us. It's a gesture from the universe, beckoning us, demanding us to integrate it and thereby receive its blessing. By prompting, pressuring and challenging us to come to terms with it and receive its gifts, malignant egophrenia has the potential to awaken us, thereby furthering the evolution of the species.

The fact that malignant egophrenia is manifesting in fully visible form in our world right now is an expression that this particular energy is available for assimilation in a way un-imaginable until now. When an unconscious content is ready to be integrated, it always gets dreamed up into fully materialized form. This is the dimension in which the energy bound up in the infinitely regressing feedback loop of the disease can be accessed and redeemed.

This quantum leap in consciousness that is being offered us by egophrenia is fully imaginable into actualization in this very moment. If we can make use of its lessons, ME disease becomes a portal into a more whole and integrated part of our being, both individually and collectively. Egophrenia is introducing and initiating us into the dreamlike nature of reality, where this universe is like a mass shared dream that we are all collaboratively dreaming up into full-bodied materialization together. This is to have the realization that we are interconnected and not separate from one another, as if we are parts of and contained in a greater being. We wouldn’t be able to have this expansion of consciousness without egophrenia, so therefore egophrenia is a ‘potential’ blessing in a very convincing disguise that it's not.

Being a non-local field phenomenon, the malignant egophrenia epidemic is something all six billion of us are collaboratively creating and dreaming up together. Bush is an embodied, mirrored reflection of a part of ourselves, just like we, reciprocally, are a reflection of a part of him. His disease is our disease. Bush and his regime are a living, full-bodied reflection of our collective shadow, as we are of theirs. We have all dreamed them up to play out these archetypal roles, in full living color, so that we can see and integrate these parts of ourselves. Embracing these parts of ourselves that we see so clearly reflected in Bush and Co. is the first step towards healing the situation. This is because it dispells the polarization and separation, which is the root factor preventing reconciliation. Bush and Co. are playing out roles that exist deep inside the collective psyche of all of humanity. If Bush and Co. weren’t around, there would be someone else sent by ‘central casting’ to pick up and play out these very same archetypal roles. Compassion spontaneously arises when we truly recognize these fear-ridden parts of ourselves.

[b]GENUINE COMPASSION AS ACTIVISM[/b]

The malignant egophrenia epidemic is happening right in front of us. It is self-evident for all who have eyes to see. If we don't look at what’s happening, if we turn away, ignore it, and contract against it, we are lying to ourselves. Then we’re colluding with and unknowingly feeding the disease. Our looking away is a form of blindness. Our looking away is a form of ignorance. Our looking away, our contraction, is itself the disease. Our resulting complacency and inaction is, in fact, an expression of our lack of compassion. To quote Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. "One who passively accepts evil [allowing it to happen] is as much involved in it as the one who perpetrates it."

There is a great danger when we see evil, though. To quote Jung, "It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our hearts.....the sight of evil kindles evil in the soul." Malignant egophrenia forces upon us the responsibility to come to terms with the evil inside our own hearts. If we solidify Bush as being evil and react with righteous indignation, we are guilty of the very same thing we’re accusing Bush of (i.e, projecting the shadow). We then become a conduit for the very evil we’re reacting to. Who among us has not been guilty of being a channel for ME disease at one time or another? If, when we see this virulent pathogen, we contract against it and react in any way, be it in judgment, hatred, anger or revulsion, we’re helping to perpetuate the diabolical polarization that is the signature of the disease. Our reacting in this way, which is typical of many political activists, is itself an expression that we ourselves have the disease, or to say it more clearly, the disease has us.

This disease literally has the potential to humble us. We may think--not us, we could never catch this disease. However, this very arrogance opens us up to being hooked by the pathogen. We may think--let's step out of our arrogance, for who are we to know anything? Let's be an enlightened bodhisattva and not judge what Bush is doing, for who are we to judge? Or let's be an enlightened psychiatrist and not diagnose, name or pathologize Bush in any way, for we don't want to cast any spells. However, to have these attitudes is to fall under the seductive spell of the bug, causing us to disconnect from and give away our power. In this way, we forsake one of our greatest spiritual treasures, the act of discernment. Being a spiritual warrior embraces and includes the most extreme discernment, which is the ability to differentiate and is a function of seeing clearly. Discernment is different than when we are unconsciously caught in judgement, which is a reaction to and contraction against something. Wielding the wisdom of discernment is an expression of having genuine compassion.

Compassion is sometimes fierce, though. Sometimes it says "no," and sets a boundary. Genuine compassion is not always smiley-faced, otherwise known as "idiot compassion," which just enables and reinforces asleepness. Genuine compassion is not passive. It propels us to act for the benefit of all beings. True compassion demands us to be willing to consciously step into our power, mediated through the heart, and to find the courage to speak our true voice: The malignant egophrenia epidemic has induced a form of criminal insanity in the entire Bush regime that we are all complicit in by allowing it to happen.

With Bush as president it’s as if we’re in a car going over the speed limit being driven by a drunk adolescent who has fallen asleep at the wheel. It’s our responsibility to recognize the extreme danger of our situation and come together to do something about it, whatever that might be. If not, if we continue to passively and helplessly watch what is playing out in front of our very eyes, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. To quote Abraham Lincoln, "We--even we here--hold the power, and bear the responsibility." Now is the time to join together and creatively express our true voice. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. says "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Our only limitation is in our own imagination.

Malignant egophrenia is a true ‘reconciling symbol,’ in that it unites the opposites. Malignant egophrenia is both a deadly disease and the highest blessing co-joined in one phenomenon. Is it a wave or a particle? It is a true ‘coincidentia oppositorum,’ a conjunction of opposites, an expression of divinity. The question is, do we recognize what is being symbolically shown to us by egophrenia, or not?

The inner meaning of the word apocalypse is ‘something hidden being revealed.’ Will these apocalyptic end times we are in be an initiation into a more expansive part of our being? Or will it destroy our species? The choice is truly ours. All that is needed is for enough of us to recognize what is being revealed, and to creatively act out of this realization. - http://baltimorechronicle .com...

Partying While Baghdad Burns ...

01.15.05 (5:11 pm) [edit]

While death benefits for troops in Iraq remain at $12,000, George W. Bush is throwing himself a $40 million party to celebrate the first time in his life he out-achieved his father. But the dynastic dysfunction continues into the next generation.

The Bush twins wanted to book Kid Rock to headline the inauguration youth concert they are hosting. But the White House was forced to disinvite him after family values groups complained about his vulgar, sex-soaked lyrics, including these lines from "Pimp of the Nation":

Pimp of the Nation, I could be it
As a matter of a fact, I foresee it
But only pimpin' hoes with the big tush
While you be left pimpin' Barbara Bush

This leaves the Bush daughters with a problem: What star from the thin ranks of white male rappers can replace Kid Rock? It seems unlikely to be fellow Detroit native Eminem, who sang in his explosive pre-election release "Mosh":

Let the president answer our high anarchy
Strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war
Let him impress daddy that way

As for the Beastie Boys, they rapped in "It Takes Time to Build":

Maybe it's time that we impeach Tex
And the military muscle that he wants to flex
By the time Bush is done, what will be left
Selling votes like E-pills at the discotheque
Environmental destruction and the national debt
But plenty of dollars left in the fat war chest

Of course, they can't invite any of the musicians from the pro-Kerry, Vote for Change concerts: Bruce Springsteen; Pearl Jam; R.E.M.; Jackson Brown; Bonnie Raitt; Ben Harper; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; Sheryl Crow; Dave Matthews; the Dixie Chicks; Foo Fighters; Tracy Chapman; or Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds.

Is anyone left?

There are always the Republican stalwarts Ted Nugent and Brooks & Dunn. But here's to hoping the Bush twins invite the Olsen Twins. It would be one wild and crazy after-party: "Double, double the trouble, double, double the fun." - http://www.thenation.com/edcu...

White House Fought Curbs on Torture, Interrogation Abuses ...

01.14.05 (6:43 am) [edit]

At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress saying that the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the war on terrorism" because it is unnecessary.

The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of the military or intelligence bills.

In interviews on Wednesday, both Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican negotiator, and Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democratic negotiator, said the lawmakers had ultimately decided that the question of whether to extend the restrictions to intelligence officers was too complex to be included in the legislation.

"The conferees agreed that they would drop the language but with the caveat that the intelligence committees would take up the issue this year," Ms. Collins said.

Ms. Harman said, "If there are special circumstances around some intelligence interrogations, we should understand that before we legislate."

Some Democratic Congressional officials said they believed that the Bush administration was trying to maintain some legal latitude for the C.I.A. to use interrogation practices more extreme than those permitted by the military.

In its report last summer, the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks recommended that the United States develop policies to guarantee that captured terrorists were treated humanely.

Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer who left the department in 2002, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed that the administration had "always wanted to leave a loophole where the C.I.A. could engage in actions just up to the line of torture."

The administration has said almost nothing about the C.I.A. operation to imprison and question terror suspects designated as high-value detainees, even as it has expressed disgust about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Senior officials have sought in recent public statements to emphasize that the government will continue to abide by federal laws that prohibit torture.

At his confirmation hearing last week on his nomination to be attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales said he found torture abhorrent.

The issue of the C.I.A.'s treatment of detainees first arose after agency officials sought legal guidance on how far its employees and contractors could go in interrogating terror suspects and whether the law barred the C.I.A. from using extreme methods, including feigned drowning, in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders captured by the United States. He was apprehended in Pakistan in early 2002.

An August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department said that interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture. The administration disavowed that opinion last summer after the classified legal opinion was publicly disclosed.

A new opinion made public late last month, signed by James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, explicitly rejected torture and adopted more restrictive standards to define it.

But a cryptic footnote to the new document about the "treatment of detainees" referred to what the officials said were other still-classified opinions. The footnote meant, the officials said, that coercive techniques approved by the Justice Department under the looser interpretation of the torture statutes were still lawful even under the new, more restrictive interpretation.

Current and former government officials said specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of still-secret documents, including an August 2002 one by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.'s use of some 20 interrogation practices. The legal opinion was sent to the C.I.A. via the National Security Council at the White House.

Among the procedures approved by the document was waterboarding, in which a subject is made to believe he might be drowned.

The document was intended to guide the C.I.A. in its interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and a handful of other high-level detainees. Instead, it led to a series of exchanges between the Justice Department and the intelligence agency as they debated exact procedures to be employed against individual detainees.

At times, their discussion included an assessment of whether specific measures, on a detainee by detainee basis, would cause such pain as to be considered torture.

In addition to Ms. Collins and Ms. Harman, the lawmakers in the conference committee negotiations were Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan.

The Senate measure to impose new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures, drafted by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was in an amendment introduced by Mr. Lieberman and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. And in little-noticed comments on the Senate floor in December, Mr. Durbin complained that the decision by conferees to delete the measure had been "troublesome."

"I think the intelligence community should be held to the same standards as the Department of Defense," Mr. Durbin said in those remarks, "and taking this language out of the bill will make that very difficult to monitor, as I hoped we would be able to do."

A Congressional Democrat said the White House stance had left the impression "that the administration wanted an escape hatch to preserve the option of using torture" against prisoners held by the C.I.A.

The only public statement from the Bush administration about the kinds of restrictions proposed by Mr. Durbin came last June, when the Defense Department expressed strong opposition to a measure in the military authorization bill. That measure, adopted by the Senate, also imposed restrictions prohibiting torture as well as cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment but it applied only to Defense Department personnel.

In a letter to Congress, Daniel J. Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's principal deputy counsel, criticized the legislation as unnecessary, saying it would "leave the current state of the law exactly where it is." Mr. Dell'Orto also criticized as "onerous" and inappropriate other provisions in the measure that would require the Pentagon to submit annual facility-by-facility reports to Congress on the status of detainees.

Ultimately, the House did not include the measure in its version of that military bill, and the final version of the legislation included only nonbinding language expressing a sense of Congress that American personnel should not engage in torture. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/0...

Bush's Miserable Failure: Fear and Voting in Baghdad ...

01.14.05 (6:40 am) [edit]

Journalism yields a world of clichés but here, for once, the first cliché that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.

Jan. 30, that day upon which the blessings of democracy will shower upon us, is approaching with all the certainty and speed of doomsday. The latest Zarqawi video shows the execution of six Iraqi policemen. Each shot in the back of the head, one by one. A survivor plays dead. Then a gunman walks confidently up behind him and blows his head apart with bullets.

These images haunt everyone. At the al-Hurriya intersection Tuesday morning, four truckloads of Iraqi national guardsmen -- the future saviors of Iraq, according to President Bush -- are passing my car. Their rifles are porcupine quills, pointing at every motorist, every Iraqi on the pavement, the Iraqi army pointing their weapons at their own people. And they are all wearing masks -- black hoods or ski masks or kuffiyas that leave only slits for frightened eyes.

Just before it collapsed finally into the hands of the insurgents last summer, I saw exactly the same scene in the streets of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. Now I am watching them in the capital.

At Kamal Jumblatt Square beside the Tigris, two American Humvees approach the roundabout. Their machine-gunners are shouting at drivers to keep away from them. A big sign in Arabic on the rear of each vehicle says: "Forbidden. Do not overtake this convoy. Stay 50 meters away from it." The drivers behind obey; they know the meaning of the "deadly force" that Americans have written onto their checkpoint signs.

But the two Humvees drive into a massive traffic jam, the gunners now screaming at us to move back. When a taxi that does not notice the U.S. troops blocks their path, the American in the lead vehicle hurls a full plastic bottle of water onto its roof and the driver mounts the grass traffic circle. A truck receives the same treatment from the lead Humvee. "Go back," shouts the rear gunner, staring at us through shades. We try desperately to turn into the jam.

Yes, the Russians probably would have chucked hand grenades in Kabul. But here were the terrified "liberators" of Baghdad throwing bottles of water at the Iraqis who are supposed to enjoy a U.S.-imposed democracy on Jan. 30.

Lest anyone doubt this extraordinary scene, the rear Humvee has "Specialist Carrol" written on the windscreen. Specialist Carrol, I am sure, regards every one of us as a potential suicide bomber -- a killer on wheels -- and I can't blame him. One such bomber had just driven up to the police station in Tikrit north of Baghdad and destroyed himself and the lives of at least six policemen.

Round the corner, I discover the reason for the jam: Iraqi cops are fighting off hundreds of motorists desperate for petrol, the drivers refusing to queue any longer for the one thing that Iraq possesses in Croeses-like amounts -- petrol.

I drop by the Ramaya restaurant for lunch. Closed. They are building a 20-floor security wall around the premises. So I drive to the Rif for a pizza, occasionally tinkling the restaurant's piano while I watch the entrance for people I don't want to see. The waiters are nervous. They are happy to bring my pizza in 10 minutes. There is no one else in the restaurant, you see, and they watch the road outside like friendly rabbits. They are waiting for The Car.

I call on an old Iraqi friend who used to publish a literary magazine during Saddam Hussein's reign. "They want me to vote, but they can't protect me," he says. "Maybe there will be no suicide bomber at the polling station. But I will be watched. And what if I get a hand grenade in my home three days later? The Americans will say they did their best, Allawi's people will say I am a 'martyr for democracy.' So do you think I'm going to vote?"

At Moustansariya University, one of Iraq's best, students of English literature are to face their end-of-term exam. January marks the end of Iraqi semesters.

But one of the students tells me that his fellow students had told their teacher that -- so fraught are the times -- that they were not yet prepared for the examination. Rather than giving them all zeros, the teacher meekly postpones the exam.

I drive back through the Al-Hurriya intersection beside the Green Zone and suddenly there is a big black 4-by-4, filled with ski-masked gunmen. "Get back!" they scream at every motorist as they try to cut across the median. I roll the window down. The rear door of the 4-by-4 whacks open. A ski-masked westerner -- blond hair, blue eyes -- is pointing a Kalashnikov at my car. "Get back!" he shrieks in ghastly Arabic. Then he clears the median, followed by three armored pick-ups, windows blacked, tires skidding on the road surface, carrying the sacred westerners inside to the dubious safety of the Green Zone, the hermetically sealed compound from which Iraq is supposedly governed.

I glance at the Iraqi press. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is again warning of "civil war" in Iraq. Why do we westerners keep threatening civil war in a country whose society is tribal rather than sectarian? Of all papers, it is the Kurdish Al Takhri, loyal to Mustafa Barzani, which asks the same question. "There has never been a civil war in Iraq," the editorial thunders. And it is right. So "full ahead both" for the dreaded Jan. 30 elections and democracy.

The American generals -- with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency -- are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to "fully" participate in the elections. Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize -- as the generals, of course, all know -- that those four provinces contain more than half the population of Iraq. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

The Iceberg Cometh

01.11.05 (4:48 am) [edit]

Last week someone leaked a memo written by Peter Wehner, an aide to Karl Rove, about how to sell Social Security privatization. The public, says Mr. Wehner, must be convinced that "the current system is heading for an iceberg."

It's the standard Bush administration tactic: invent a fake crisis to bully people into doing what you want. "For the first time in six decades," the memo says, "the Social Security battle is one we can win." One thing I haven't seen pointed out, however, is the extent to which the White House expects the public and the media to believe two contradictory things.

The administration expects us to believe that drastic change is needed, and needed right away, because of the looming cost of paying for the baby boomers' retirement.

The administration expects us not to notice, however, that the supposed solution would do nothing to reduce that cost. Even with the most favorable assumptions, the benefits of privatization wouldn't kick in until most of the baby boomers were long gone. For the next 45 years, privatization would cost much more money than it saved.

Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion "to cover transition costs." Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.

But that's just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.

These numbers are based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Plan 2, which was devised by a special presidential commission in 2001 and is widely expected to be the basis for President Bush's plan.

Under Plan 2, payroll taxes would be diverted into private accounts while future benefits would be cut. In the short run, this would worsen the budget deficit. In the long run, if all went well, cutting benefit payments would reduce the deficit.

All wouldn't go well; I'll explain why in another column. But suppose that everything went according to plan. Even in that unlikely case, privatization wouldn't even begin to reduce the budget deficit until 2050. This is supposed to be the answer to an imminent crisis?

While we waited 45 years for something good to happen, there would be a real risk of a crisis - not in Social Security, but in the budget as a whole. And privatization would increase that risk.

We already have a large budget deficit, the result of President Bush's insistence on cutting taxes while waging a war. And it will get worse: a rise in spending on entitlements - mainly because of Medicare, but with a smaller contribution from Medicaid and, in a minor supporting role, Social Security - looks set to sharply increase the deficit after 2010.

Add borrowing for privatization to the mix, and the budget deficit might well exceed 8 percent of G.D.P. at some time during the next decade. That's a deficit that would make Carlos Menem's Argentina look like a model of responsibility. It would be sure to cause a collapse of investor confidence, sending the dollar through the floor, interest rates through the roof and the economy into a tailspin.

And when investors started fleeing because they believed that America had turned into a banana republic, they wouldn't be reassured by claims that someday, in the distant future, privatization would do great things for the budget. Just ask the Argentines: their version of Social Security privatization was also supposed to save money in the long run, but all it did was move forward the date of their crisis.

A responsible administration would reverse course on tax cuts and the botched 2003 Medicare drug bill, both of which pose much greater threats to the government's solvency than the modest financial shortfall of the Social Security system. But Mr. Bush has declared his tax cuts inviolable, and he says that his drug bill will actually save money. (The Medicare trustees say it will cost $8 trillion.)

There's an iceberg in front of us, all right. And Mr. Bush wants us to steam right into it, full speed ahead. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/0...

Are Cheerleaders Forced to Strip Naked, Hooded & Made to Form Pyramids???

01.10.05 (3:11 pm) [edit]

The fucking assholes in the Bush Nazi Party are claiming that the dupes who tortured innocent Iraqis did [i]nothing more [/i]than what American cheerleaders do when they "form pyramids"! [b]Fuck![/b] Is[i] everybody [/i]in the U.S.A. brain-dead? Are American cheerleaders[i] forced [/i]to strip naked, hooded and then [i]made[/i] for form pyramids?

[b]The Mad King George Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, the neo-con Nazis and their dupes who were ordered to murder, rape, humiliate, torture & sexually abuse prisoners, should be put on trial for War Crimes.[/b]

"A lawyer for Charles Graner, accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, on Monday compared piling naked prisoners into pyramids to cheerleader shows and said leashing inmates was also acceptable prisoner control.

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist sergeant's court-martial.

Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England, with whom he fathered a child and who is also facing a court-martial, became the faces of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal after they appeared in photographs that showed degraded, naked prisoners." - http://reuters.myway.com/arti...

[b]Lots of Americans have sex, so if U.S. Soldiers rape Iraqi women on orders from the sadistic pig-shit Bush, it must be the same thing as "consensual sex" according to the Bush fuckers right?[/b]

THE UGLIEST AMERICAN

01.07.05 (2:26 am) [edit]

[i]His 'actions speak louder than words' [/i]

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, nearly every nation in the world -- rich and poor, big and small, former ally and former foe -- came rushing to America's side. At few times in modern history have so many disparate peoples rallied behind one nation, this spirit of unity captured by the headline that appeared in Le Monde , France's largest daily newspaper, on Sept. 12: "We Are All Americans Now."

And yet that global goodwill vanished almost as swiftly as those four jets pierced America's bubble of invincibility. Now, three years later, the situation is completely reversed: Nearly every nation in the world has replaced goodwill with ill will, deep distrust if not outright fear and loathing.

The reason for this reversal of fortune is obvious: The Ugliest American resides in the people's house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Whether we like it or not, whether it's fair, whether it squares with any of our own feelings, George W. Bush is America's face around the world. He's our Nike swoosh, our golden arches, our Ugly American brand. Never was this more apparent than in the wake (literally) of the tsunami that has, at last count, killed nearly 150,000 people in south Asia.

What an opportunity for a real American leader! What a chance, when so many innocent people had suffered -- so many Muslims, too -- to deflate the ticking time bomb of terrorist recruitment efforts. Imagine the reaction throughout the billion-plus populace of the Muslim world had Bush flown to the area, heading a flotilla of cargo planes with food, medicine and hope. Four measly planes, let's say, and what a public relations coup that would have been! Al Jazeera would have been back-pedaling furiously on its newscasts, moderate Muslim leaders would have rushed to the front to grab this olive branch ... wait a minute ... I was dreaming of a time when we had real leaders. What was I thinking? We're stuck aboard this aircraft carrier for four more years with the Ugliest American.

So, where was George when the tsunamis hit? Oh, he spent the day pedaling his bicycle around his fake ranch like Pee Wee Herman. He could not be bothered to attend to an international crisis, not unless it involved oil. Finally, he took a break long enough to pledge, via his White House posse, a measly $15 million to the rescue effort -- one quarter of the cost of his coronation, er, inauguration on Jan. 20. Bush claimed he could adequately "monitor" the situation from his ranch (read: "I'll set out on the back porch and watch Fox News while I'm drinkin' my iced tea. I ain't givin' up my vacation for a buncha Third Worlders, especially if they ain't got any oil.").

Sadly, as I followed the news of the breaking events on the the Internet, a poll posted by America Online found that 72 percent of the respondents agreed that Bush's $15 million was an "adequate response." Putting aside politics and religion and corporate spin, isn't it about time the American people looked in the mirror and asked: How did we become so mean and ugly so soon? Are we really built in Bush's image?

Because this $15 million was America's first response, and it came belatedly and begrudgingly, any followup efforts and funds, no matter how great (at last count, Bush has been guilt-tripped into upping the ante to $350 million), can't erase that clank that Bush's initial actions sounded around the world. And yet it was in keeping with his character. The only other major crisis during his presidency came on Sept. 11, and what did he do then? He sat, glued to his chair, reading My Pet Goat , then flew quickly as far away as he could get from Washington, D.C. The leadership vacuum he left was filled by Mayor Giuliani, who helped the nation get through the agony of the next week.

Because, after the tsunami hit, action was so slow in coming -- and, yes, because he basks in world adulation -- former Pres. Bill Clinton tried to pull a Giuliani by calling for an international effort spearheaded by America. Because he -- despite all his other psychological baggage -- possesses the instincts of a real leader, Clinton correctly sensed the opportunity that this crisis provided. But Bush, sensing he was being upstaged, turned this disaster into a pissing contest. He did it in his typically craven way, too. He had his spokesman release the statement: "The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain.' He believes actions speak louder than words."

Alas, the truth. - http://hartfordadvocate.com/g...:95377

George Orwell's fascist nominee for Attorney General

01.05.05 (2:49 pm) [edit]

Somewhere in the U.S. government is the person who came up with the idea of fusing the wail of an infant with the incessant meow from a cat food commercial so as to torment detainees at Guantanamo. Detainees also were subjected to popular songs by the likes of Eminem and Rage Against the Machine. It is a mad genius who realized that ordinary American culture can, with repeated exposure, be nearly lethal. God help us all.

In George Orwell's novel "1984," it was rats that were used to torture Winston Smith, not because rats could do real damage but because they were his "worst nightmare." He succumbed, denounced his beliefs and went back to wasting his days drinking gin.

The term "Orwellian" is much abused and, back at the actual year 1984, I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called "the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy." Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years.

With immense satisfaction now, he would have noted the Bush administration's abuse of language, particularly wringing all meaning from the word "torture." Until a recent amendment, the word applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Anything less, such as, say, shackling to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is - or was until recently - considered perfectly legal.

The administration's original interpretation was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the U.S. Among other things, it produced the abuses of Abu Ghraib, which we were assured were an unaccountable exception. My God, if only higher authorities had known!

Now we all know. The International Committee of the Red Cross has complained that some of what has been done at Guantanamo - Guantanamo, not Abu Ghraib - was "tantamount to torture."

The Bush administration has raised itself above the law. It pronounced itself virtuous, but facing a threat so dire, so unique, that Gonzales found the Geneva Conventions themselves "obsolete." Such legal brilliance does not long go unrewarded. He has been nominated to become attorney general.

The elevation of Gonzales is supposed to be a singular American success story. This son of Mexican immigrants bootstrapped his way to Bush's inner circle. Then he told the President precisely what Bush wanted to hear. He came up with a brilliant definition of torture. Everyone was off the hook. Is it any wonder the Senate will probably soon confirm him? By next year, he will undoubtedly receive a cherished Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who successfully serve the President but dismally fail the nation. In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.

The revelations coming out of Guantanamo are hideous. The ordinary abuse, the incessant lying of the authorities, plus the mock interrogations staged for the press, in which detainees and their interrogators share milkshakes - all this soils us as a nation. It's as if the government is unaware of how Communists and fascists also strained language and ushered the world into torture chambers made pretty for the occasion. We now keep some pretty bad company.

The Bush administration has fused Orwell with Kafka in the same way someone fused the cry of an infant with that of a cat from the Meow Mix television commercial.

The upshot is Gonzales. He's Kafka's man, Orwell's boy and Bush's pussycat. Know him for his roar.

Meow. - http://www.nydailynews.com/ne...

Backing Herr Fuhrer Bush's 'Torture Guy' Gonzales is Backing Torture ...

01.05.05 (2:17 pm) [edit]

[b]Is there bipartisan congressional support for torture?[/b]

That is the central question the Senate Judiciary Committee faces Thursday as it begins hearings on the confirmation of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as the next attorney general of the United States. At stake is whether Congress wants to conveniently absolve Gonzales of his clear attempt to have the president subvert U.S. law in order to whitewash barbaric practices performed by U.S. interrogators in the name of national security.

Gonzales ignored the objections of State Department and military lawyers to strongly endorse the determination of Justice Department lawyers that neither the Geneva Convention nor corresponding U.S. laws on prisoner protections should be applied in the "war on terror."

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Gonzales wrote in a legal memo to President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002. Declaring the war-on-terror prisoners exempt from the Geneva Convention, he argued, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

Acting like a sleazy attorney advising a client on how not to be convicted of an ongoing crime, Gonzales was apparently not worried about irrational foreign courts or high-minded jurists in The Hague, but rather U.S. prosecutors who might enforce federal laws that ban torture of foreign prisoners of war. Indeed, Gonzales made the case for a legal end run around the 1996 War Crimes Act, which mandates criminal penalties, including the death sentence, for any U.S. military or other personnel who engage in crimes of torture.

"It is difficult to predict the motives of [U.S.] prosecutors and [U.S.] independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441" of the act, Gonzales wrote. "Your determination [that Geneva protections are not applicable] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

In light of what we have learned since about the rationalization and use of torture by U.S. interrogators over the last three years, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that Gonzales already had knowledge that such violations had occurred and expected more.

In fact, Gonzales in his memo singles out language from the Geneva Convention (and incorporated into U.S. law) that explicitly brands as a war crime "outrages against personal dignity" - a perfect description of the pattern of mental, sexual and physical degradation of U.S. detainees that has been reported by prisoners, military whistle-blowers and even FBI agents in recent months. Many of those rounded up in Muslim countries by U.S. military and intelligence personnel have reportedly been subjected to dog attacks, being chained in fetal positions in their own excrement or placed in degrading sexual postures.

On Monday, a group of military legal experts, including Rear Adm. John Hutson, who was recently the Navy's judge advocate general, released a letter to the Judiciary Committee noting that Gonzales' recommendations "fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence gathering efforts, and added to the risks facing our troops serving around the world."

Gonzales based his case for doing away with the Geneva protections on memos produced by a small group of Justice Department lawyers that, along with making other controversial claims, infamously argued that physical abuse of prisoners was torture only if it was "of an intensity akin to ... serious physical injury such as death or organ failure," and mental abuse was torture only if it caused "lasting psychological harm." Presumably these pain and damage levels are to be determined by the interrogator.

Such language was so onerous that, perhaps to help Gonzales get through the hearings, the Justice Department only last week quietly slipped new guidelines onto its website redressing this stain on the country's reputation. Although still vague in many parts, the new doctrine belatedly reasserts the primacy of international and federal law in the treatment of prisoners, even those captured in relation to the war on terror.

Another positive step would be the withdrawal or rejection of the Gonzales nomination. To make a man with so little respect for both the spirit and the letter of the law the nation's top law enforcement official would be a terrible advertisement for American democracy. - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...

Bushy-boy's Bloodbath is a Sink-Hole: $100 Billion MORE to be Swindled from U.S. Taxpayers!!!

01.04.05 (4:23 am) [edit]

Congress expects the White House to request as much as $100 billion this year for war and related costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional officials say.

It would be the third and largest Iraq-related budget request from the White House yet, and it could push the war's costs over $200 billion — far above initial White House estimates of $50 billion-$60 billion. So far, the Iraq war has cost about $130 billion, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget.

War costs complicate President Bush's plans for initiatives such as overhauling Social Security. They also threaten his pledge to halve the record $413 billion federal budget deficit.

Jim Dyer, chief of staff of the House Appropriations Committee, traditionally the first stop in Congress for any official request for money, said he expects a funding proposal from the Bush administration by Easter that "could be around $100 billion," the vast majority of it for Iraq.

In the Senate, Bill Hoagland, the top budget aide to Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, agreed: "Based on current spending profiles, it would not surprise me if ... (a bill) approaching $100 billion is requested early this year." That would be equal to almost one-quarter of the Pentagon's $417.5 billion 2005 budget.

Both expect the proposal to come as a "supplemental" spending request, a move that would keep it out of the budget Bush will submit in February.

The White House budget office declined to comment on the number. "It's too early to say what our needs will be," spokesman Chad Kolton said. He said the Iraq request is being kept out of the budget to provide time to get a more accurate cost estimate and to make it easier to reduce funding when U.S. troops are eventually withdrawn.

Members of Congress expect a big price tag for Iraq this year.

"I hope they ask for something big," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Look, this is a test of wills. We need to show our enemies that we are not going to do this on the cheap. "

But there is growing annoyance with the White House for refusing to treat the cost of the military operations in Iraq — roughly $5 billion a month, according to the House Appropriations Committee — as part of the annual budget.

"There is a feeling among a lot of members that ... this war has become enough of a routine that they should be able to build it into their annual budgeting and not have to come back to us for supplemental funding of that size," said Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., head of the House Appropriations panel that oversees spending on foreign operations.

"The annual budget proposal we've been given by the White House falsely portrays the bottom line," said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. - http://www.usatoday.com/news/...

Bushy-boy's Bloodbath is a Sink-Hole: $100 Billion MORE to be Swindled from U.S. Taxpayers!!!

01.04.05 (4:21 am) [edit]

Moonbutt-hole Alert!!!

01.03.05 (8:24 am) [edit]

[b]HERR FUHRER BUSH'S GOP CONGRESSIONAL TOADIES ARE BETRAYING THE U.S.A. – GOP HOPES TO WEAKEN ETHICS COMMITTEE[/b]

House Republicans are pushing members to alter the chamber's ethics rules to make it harder for lawmakers to discipline a colleague, http://www.washingtonpost.com... the Washington Post reports. GOP leaders "also want to relax a restriction on relatives of lawmakers accepting foreign and domestic trips from groups interested in legislation before the House," and to alter ethics rules so that either party could stop the committee from investigating a complaint against a member. The moves come three months after Majority Leader Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX) was admonished three times in one week by the House ethics committee, and weeks after House Republicans "rewrote a party rule so that DeLay can keep his leadership job even if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury."

[b]THESE NEO-CON FASCISTS ARE PROTECTING THEMSELVES!!![/b]