A wide-eyed President George W. Bush speaks on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, hours before committing an epically violent mistake:

“Leaders in the region speak of a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade. And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.”

Western style goodness will re-make the Middle East. Didn’t we hear that over and over?

Yes we did. Especially after 2003 when even the neocons realized that the supposed reason for the invasion, Saddam’s nuclear weapons, or, more generally, his weapons of mass destruction, were a Bush administration mirage. The reason for the thousands of dead bodies did not exist.

Well, our democratic and freedom-loving ways will still change their world. The Iraqis will get direct elections. They will get freedom of speech and thought and religion. Free trade will blossom, new products and new ways and wild innovation will result. The hamstrung Iraqis — heck, all of the Arab states and their neighbors — will spasm with catharsis upon being blessed with American Freedom and the companion Manual of Western Ways.

And the United States will be whom to thank for it all.

Well, George and his brutal idealists weren’t right. They weren’t even close. After 7 years of unfathomable violence and misery, and of perhaps burning or burying a million corpses, we’re dragging ourselves back home. Only most of us, that is — there are still 50,000 of us there, and we’ll be there for a decade or decades to come.

Did we create Western Peace? Hardly. McClatchy’s daily list of violent episodes in Iraq reported several bombs and dead bodies yesterday.

Did we install a Western Government?

Patrick Cockburn: There is still no government and violence is increasing
Wednesday, 1 September 2010 | The Independent

The Iraq the US is leaving behind is a country in which violence is increasing and political parties have failed to produce a government six months after parliamentary elections . .

No. Did we otherwise improve the lives of the Iraqis? What — with all the busted infrastructure, poor drinking water and measly few hours of electricity per day? Doesn’t look like it.

Well, then, what has America done? What of our inspiring ideals and ways did we really instill? What can we take credit for in this desperate, war-ravaged country?

How about “Put Him in Bucca”? It’s a Reality TV show. Yes, but before you reflexively despise this latest scion of the U.S. pioneered genre, consider that this is Iraq’s take on it. And it goes like this: the show’s staff plant a fake bomb in some celebrity’s car, and then they film the guy trying to get through a security checkpoint.

The show, “Put Him in Camp Bucca,” has been on the air since the start of Ramadan, according to the New York Times’ At War blog, and has since generated lots of criticism from Iraqi newspapers, mainly because it hits so close to home and is also a horrible idea.

But “Camp Bucca” keeps rolling on, because who doesn’t love the terrified look of a man who thinks he’s going to spend a long while in an American-built maximum security prison? One of the guests pleads to the soldier at the checkpoint:

“I am a family man. I have two kids. How could I do this to my family? I am telling you the truth, it’s not me who planted the bomb . .”

HA! HO! It’s not me! Please, don’t kill me!

Without our efforts, this wouldn’t be amusing.

New York Times:

Legacy of Torture
EDITORIAL | Published: August 26, 2010

. . Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated.

The report details how the use of torture abroad, with the silence or assent of the U.S., and the use of George W. Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ in American facilities have produced a multi-tentacled legal monster, gumming up or destroying case after case against detainees, some of whom are probably legally responsible for crimes against Americans.

Judges have found it impossible to be sure of the detainees’ confessions given the circumstances under which they were obtained.

The government’s case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.

But a federal judge rejected Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah’s confessions, concluding that he had concocted them under intense coercion.

So insidious and long-lasting are the effects of torture that virtually all subsequent confessions become suspect as well:

Al Rabiah

Even statements that the government insisted Al Rabiah had made under noncoercive, or “clean,” questioning were tainted, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled, and she ordered that Al Rabiah be released.

The government has lost eight of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated . .

To wit:

Government lawyers didn’t contest that [Saeed Mohammed Saleh] Hatim, while held for six months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, had been beaten repeatedly, kicked and “threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida,” according to U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina’s opinion. Instead, they submitted confessions he gave after arriving at Guantánamo, under cleaner questioning. But Urbina found that Hatim’s confession was “tainted by torture” and ordered that he be released. The government is appealing the decision.

Does any of this surprise anybody? I doubt it. And the negative legal reach of torture isn’t trivial, moving well beyond the cases of the victims:

Last year, Justice Department lawyers tried to show that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed was an al-Qaida fighter by using statements from another detainee, Binyam Mohamed, whose “harrowing” interrogation ordeal was described in an 81-page opinion by Senior Judge Gladys Kessler.

Binyam Mohamed, now free

For two years, beginning with his capture in April 2002, foreign interrogators holding him “at the behest of the United States” beat and kicked him, chained him to a wall, kept him half-standing for long stretches and cut him with a blade, including on his genitals. He was “fed information” and “told to verify it.” During that time, he was also interrogated by the FBI and CIA.

The government’s lawyers didn’t contest the allegations of mistreatment but instead argued that the treatment of the informant didn’t undermine the evidence he gave later . .

But Kessler didn’t buy that better treatment had done the trick. Given that, “throughout his detention, a constant barrage of physical and psychological abuse was employed in order to manipulate him and program him into telling investigators what they wanted to hear,” she wrote, it was “more than plausible” that he had also manufactured details in nonabusive questioning.

So, even with American handlers, under reasonable treatment, making statements against somebody else, the evidence is still junk.

Didn’t we all know we’d end up here? I think so.

If you’re considering the use of torture, you’re going to have to change completely the character and habits of a nation in order to be honestly successful. Good nations produce good legal systems. When the use of torture becomes apparent, the system rejects the ‘evidence,’ and the cases die. It’s predictable. Otherwise, you’d have to become Saudi Arabia or Egypt to rack up many wins. It looks bad now, but the tossing of so many cases is actually good news.

Oh, and haven’t the predicted verdicts come in against shortsighted Dick Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, as well? Losers.

Serves him right, the hypocrite. Unless, you know, he’s saying that once you’re married you can fuck anybody, which is a pretty good loophole. Here he champions abstinence in an interview with the same woman he was banging on the side:

What people react most nastily to are the politicians who find it so easy and politically rewarding to publicly gild the difficult things they’re incapable of.

Remaining abstinent throughout your teens and early twenties, remaining that way while finding a mate to spend your life with — it’s an almost impossible task.

For some droopy old lifeless politicians to demand the youth of America do so, it’s an extremely dubious ploy. Almost nobody believes it’s realistic for the young; it’s much more likely merely to be in the best interests of the wrinkled politicians’ careers. Souder probably had half the testosterone he did as a nineteen year-old, but he couldn’t keep it in his pants even though he knew it could end up destroying his marriage and career. Horny kids with nothing to lose — why again are they supposed to abstain?

Ditto for all the Republicans who cheer-led the War in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby, Gingrich, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, DeLay, Boehner, Frist, Armey, Santorum, Gramm, Lott — all of them beatified the war with their patriotic fervor and hot, heavy tears. All of them demanded that the brutal operation was critically necessary to prevent this pressing threat from killing Americans in the future.

So, many men who listened were foolish enough to believe them and went off to die. Fairly none of those politicians had been patriotic or passionate enough to go overseas to take up arms in a previous America’s War, to keep Communism from killing Americans in the future, when the nation’s leaders called them to serve: in Vietnam.

George Bush slipped into the Champagne Texas Air National Guard unit. Dick Cheney got 5 deferments in a row before — curse the luck — getting his wife pregnant. Rush Limbaugh got a painful cyst on his ass — these tales of checkerboard patriotism are never-ending among the Chickenhawks.

Paul Wolfowitz did not serve, Richard Perle did not serve, Douglas Feith did not serve, Eliot Abrams did not serve, Ari Fleischer did not serve, Andrew Card did not serve, Ken Adelman did not serve, Wayne LaPierre did not serve, Don Evans did not serve, Michael Ledeen did not serve, Frank Gaffney did not serve, John Bolton did not serve, and, of course, Rudy Giuliani did not serve.

Mark Souder, too, though turning 18 in 1968, did not serve in Vietnam.

Politics first, last and always with the Bushies:

Do you remember this fool? She’s a legend:

Karl Rove was George W. Bush’s right-hand political guy during the horrible 2001-through-2008 years of our American history.

He’s recently written a memoir of the time he spent as adviser to the most powerful man in the world. In the account, he doesn’t apparently regret telling the nation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Iraqis would give them to terrorists, or regret using those falsehoods to take the country to war, killing thousands of Americans.

Once the truth became known, he regrets not pushing back harder against his and the president’s opponents:

Rove Admits to Error On Iraq As Bush Strategist

Political strategist Karl Rove says President George W. Bush made the right decision to launch the Iraq war in 2003, but the former White House adviser admits the failure to find weapons of mass destruction badly damaged the administration’s credibility.

In his new memoir, “Courage and Consequence,” Rove blames himself for not pushing back against claims that Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency.

Rove says Bush did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.

Mindless Bush supporters greased the skids for the Great Recession, and maybe now they reap the rewards. Chaos is unpredictable.

Mike Huckabee, the last Republican candidate standing against John McCain for the Republican presidential nod at the end of 2008, is just an outsider to all the current Conservative hub-bub.

Mike Huckabee rips CPAC

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday as outdated, nearly corrupt and unrepresentative of the conservative movement.

Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential contender and potential 2012 candidate who had spoken at the conference for years, said the reason he blew it off this year was that the meeting has become dominated by libertarian activists.

“CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn’t go this year” . .

Meaning that CPAC is ” . . less Republican” in the sense of ‘a lot less willing sit through the same old cob-webby Christian Huckabee spiel.’ Mike was once a convenient friend of the religio-political power cabal that turned the country inside out. He doesn’t understand why his message is no longer thrilling.

Huckabee said the rise of the tea party movement had “taken all of the oxygen out of the room,” rendering the venerable conference far less relevant than it had been in previous years.

“Where CPAC was historically the event, the tea parties are having their own events all over the country and a lot more truly grassroots people are getting involved because of the tea parties,” said the former governor.

So when grass-roots activism arises out of the sleepy Conservative wing, that’s not current, relevant? Sounds like a case for yesterday’s news, not today’s.

:B

When a guy reportedly gets on board a Detroit-bound plane with 80 grams of PETN, which is pretty much TNT, the system failed. That’s the truth, that’s what people need to hear–this was a terrifying failure. Whose system failed and how, those are now literally the burning questions. Coulda been Amsterdam’s with the Americans’ sharing the blame in not making clear enough their security demands. But this is a failure, and sensible people want to know who and what is to blame.

The system worked, after the fact? This is classic Bush-era smiley-face government administration. Your Homeland Security person is supposed to be the type who couches everything in sober worry and caution, not mindless happy-speak. If she’s gotta go, she’s gotta go.

Here are some idiots with 10 grams of PETN:

See the earlier post, including the CBS News story and interview, here.

Indiana National Guardsman Lt. Col. Jim Gentry died a week ago Wednesday, November 25th. He was 52 years old.

A retired Indiana National Guard lieutenant colonel, Gentry was the commander of the 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry, which, at about 600 soldiers strong, was in Iraq from February 2003 to February 2004.

This Indiana National Guard unit was responsible for protecting US civilians working for KBR at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Southern Iraq. Returning this water plant to full operation was essential to restoring Iraqi oil production and KBR had the contract to do that.

Unfortunately, upon retreat, Saddam loyalists sabotaged the plant by cutting open bags of sodium dichromate, a yellow-orange powered rust inhibitor, and spread it everywhere. Not being informed by KBR management what this powder was, soldiers and civilians alike took few precautions to protect themselves. People started experiencing symptoms of chronic nose bleeds, headaches, skins lesions. Even after countless complaints KBR did not test the substance and inform anyone as to the hazards. Click HERE for five short (18 min total) deposition testimony videos of KBR management putting their spin on why soldiers and civilians weren’t informed of the inherent health risks of this “yellow-orange” powder.

Gentry, even after being retired and diagnosed with cancer, led his soldiers with strength and dignity. He became an outspoken advocate demanding investigations and VA coverage for illnesses believed to have been caused by the toxic exposure…

A sombrero-sized h/t to mssparky.com for all their hard work…

Is Obama about to speak? Then look at me! Over here!

Dick Cheney slams President Obama for projecting ‘weakness’
By MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI | 12/1/09 5:40 PM EST

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

What a load of garbage from a guy famous for a fatal inability to make the right decision, by whatever means. Dick Cheney, the guy who was unable to protect America during 9/11. Who then retaliated by attacking Bumfuckistan Mesopotamia, killing 4,00 Americans. I can’t believe this moron is popping his head out and his mouth off in his own version of political whack-a-mole. Dangerous, incompetent and classless, what a trifecta.

Meanwhile, the guy who runs the War in Afghanistan, Republican hero General McChrystal, issued a statement commenting on Obama’s address and the ‘dithering’ review:

“The Afghanistan-Pakistan review led by the President has provided me with a clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task. The clarity, commitment and resolve outlined in the President’s address are critical steps toward bringing security to Afghanistan and eliminating terrorist safe havens that threaten regional and global security.

“The NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) objective is equally clear: We will work toward improved security for Afghanistan and the transfer of responsibility to Afghan security forces as rapidly as conditions allow. In the meantime, our Afghan partners need the support of Coalition forces while we grow and develop the capacity of the Afghan army and police. That will be the main focus of our campaign in the months ahead.

“The 42 other nations of the Coalition will benefit from a strengthened U.S. commitment, as success in Afghanistan must be an international, integrated civil-military effort – from our security and training capacity to the governance and economic development assistance that sustains long-term stability. The concerted commitment of the international community will prevail in bringing real change to Afghanistan — a secure and stable environment that allows for effective governance, improved economic opportunity and the freedom of every Afghan to choose how they live.

“We face many challenges in Afghanistan, but our efforts are sustained by one unassailable reality: neither the Afghan people nor the international community want Afghanistan to remain a sanctuary for terror and violence. The coalition is encouraged by President Obama’s commitment and we remain resolute to empowering the Afghan people to reject the insurgency and build their own future.”

Spot on, again, Dick, dead center in reality. And by forcing a time table upon the corrupt Afghan government, they either straighten up or fail of their own accord, not that you’d think of these things. Because you just move to the right on everything, which makes you about as smart as a one-legged insect.

Go ahead Dick, take another shot: how about that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed trial in New York?

“One of their top people will be given the opportunity — courtesy of the United States government and the Obama administration — to have a platform from which they can espouse this hateful ideology that they adhere to,” he said. “I think it’s likely to give encouragement — aid and comfort — to the enemy.”

Zacarias Moussaoui ran his mouth his whole entire civilian trial in Federal court in Virginia. Don’t you recall how emboldened Al Qaeda became? Don’t you remember how much aid and comfort it gave the enemy? Weren’t you just crushed by that? Remember how Americans were agonized by it all? No?

Zacarias Moussaoui came off like an hysterical, dogmatic clown, powerless and pathetic. [here comment on dick cheney] The moron failed, on the world stage, to do the job he was tasked to do, so now he just talks to the bricks. [here comment again]

..Dick Cheney’s ‘terrorists’ would do whatever was ‘right’ regardless of what anyone else thought.

Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson:

…what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Jonathan S. Landay:

“The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist,” reported McClatchy Newspaper’s Jonathan Landay in April.

It was in this period that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times.

Robert Windrem:

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney…

Without admitting where the suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and understood the rationale as political—and ultimately counterproductive to the overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of finding Saddam Hussein’s WMD after the invasion.