Bush Administration Intention to Deceive

The Bush Administration continues along the only path that has worked so far. The path of deception. The administration will propagate a pack of lies to support its self-serving agenda of market colonization and gunboat venture capitalism.

I hope the Canadians come to the rescue, and quickly! Or something.

Bush Team Casts Foes as Defeatist

Blunt Rhetoric Signals a New Thrust
By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 31, 2006; Page A01

President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions.

With an appearance before the American Legion in Salt Lake City today, Bush will begin a series of speeches over 20 days centered on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he and his top lieutenants have foreshadowed in recent days the thrust of the effort to put Democrats on the defensive with rhetoric that has further inflamed an already emotional debate.

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link: http://www.washingtonpost...

"Retroactive Laws Invoked to Protect Administration Officials from War Crimes Prosecution"

Retroactive laws... Is that possible? I didn't know that laws could take effect retroactively. Isn't that like losing the game, then changing the rules to alter the outcome into a win? Life doesn't work like that, and as far as I know, neither does the justice system.

Whether or not the Bush Administration is successful in seeking protection from war crime prosecution, we still have a job to do as citizens of the USA. We need to hold those guilty of crimes against the state, and crimes against humanity accountable for their actions.

Here's what PCR says.

Bush Turns His Terror War on the Homeland

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

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Benjamin Ferenccz, a chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg, recently said that President Bush should be tried as a war criminal side by side with Saddam Hussein for starting aggressive wars, Hussein for his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Under the Nuremberg standard, Bush is definitely a war criminal. The US Supreme Court also exposed Bush to war crime charges under both the US War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Geneva Conventions when the Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld against the Bush administration's military tribunals and inhumane treatment of detainees.

President Bush and his Attorney General agree that under existing laws and treaties Bush is a war criminal together with many members of his government. To make his war crimes legal after the fact, Bush has instructed the Justice (sic) Department to draft changes to the War Crimes Act and to US treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

One of Bush's changes would deny protection of the Geneva Conventions to anyone in any American court.

Bush's other change would protect from prosecution any US government official or military personnel guilty of violating Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 prohibits "at any time and in any place whatsoever outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff observes, this change would also undo Senator John McCain's amendment against torture.

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link: http://www.counterpunch....

Moral and Ethical Bankruptcy

The United States of America, has attained, in the eyes of many, a moral and ethical bankruptcy.

Thanks to the vigilance of Lt. Ehren Watada, the people of the USA, the people of Iraq, and the people of the world have a chance to challenge the fraudulent foundations of the military operation in Iraq.

This is an opportunity to demand accountability for the political and military failure. Tens of thousands of American casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, lives and families torn apart, cannot go unanswered.

Certain justice must be brought to bear on the perpetrators of this criminal war. The Bush administration's deception must be met with a resounding call for resolution.

Join the call for justice. Support the truth, impeach, convict and arrest the architects of this foul war effort!

[edit 8-29: Here's a link to Lt. Watada's website, where there is information on how to help the USA: http://thankyoult.org]

Bush Administration/Elliott Abrams Behind Israeli Attack on Lebanon?

Here's another example of a perspective, which is altogether lacking from the nation's traditional mainstream media. The Bush administration culpable for more mayhem and violence in the middle east? But no... surely there must be a good murder or arson to occupy the top of the page, or to take the lead television news story.

Something is drastically wrong with the USA, this article describes one part of the problem.

link: http://www.counterpunch...

August 25, 2006

Gangster Diplomacy

Elliot Abrams in Jerusalem

By TOM BARRY
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Since he joined the Bush administration in 2002 as the chief Middle East adviser at the White House's National Security Council, Elliott Abrams has quietly pushed for a transformational Middle East policy with Israel at its center. If one U.S. official were to be blamed-aside from the president, vice president, and secretary of state-for the U.S. government's disastrous stance with Israel in the recent war, it would be Elliot Abrams. Perhaps more than any other member of Bush's foreign policy team, Abrams embodies the administration's zealous, ideological, and dangerously delusional vision of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Abrams, a neoconservative who has dedicated himself to reshaping U.S. foreign policy since the mid-1970s, is the Bush administration's point man for Middle East transformation. According to Seymour Hersh writing in the August 21 New Yorker, Cheney's foreign policy staff and Abrams in early summer had signed off on an Israeli plan to wipe out Hezbollah.
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Ex-CIA Chief on Terrorism and US Foreign Policy

This worthwhile article is via Harper's and Ken Silverstein. Michael Scheuer discusses the connections between US foreign policy and terrorism (past and present.) Here it is without further ado:

Six Questions for Michael Scheuer on National Security

Posted on Wednesday, August 23, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004; he served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the formerly anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America. I met him for breakfast last week at an IHOP in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington. Over a plate of eggs and hash browns, he answered a series of questions about the current state of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terrorism.” His prognosis was illuminating and insightful—and, unfortunately, almost unrelentingly grim.

1. We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?

On balance, more vulnerable. We're safer in terms of aircraft travel. We're safer from being attacked by some dumbhead who tries to come into the country through an official checkpoint; we've spent billions on that. But for the most part our victories have been tactical and not strategic. There have been important successes by the intelligence services and Special Forces in capturing and killing Al Qaeda militants, but in the long run that's just a body count, not progress. We can't capture them one by one and bring them to justice. There are too many of them, and more now than before September 11. In official Western rhetoric these are finite organizations, but every time we interfere in Muslim countries they get more support.

In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil...
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7. And finally, an extra question—what needs to be done?

This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do. We are confronting a jihad that is inspired by the tangible and visible impact of our policies. People are willing to die for that, and we're not going to win by killing them off one by one. We have a dozen years of reliable polling in the Middle East, and it shows overwhelming hostility to our policies—and at the same time it shows majorities that admire the way we live, our ability to feed and clothe our children and find work. We need to tell the truth to set the stage for a discussion of our foreign policy.

At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can't do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny—the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors. We should have started on this back in 1973, at the time of the first Arab oil embargo, but we've never moved away from our dependence. As it stands, we are going to have to fight wars if anything endangers the oil supply in the Middle East.

What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don't have options because our economy and our allies' economies are dependent on Middle East oil. What benefit do we get by letting China commit genocide-by-inundation by moving thousands and thousands of Han Chinese to overcome the dominance of Muslim Uighurs? What do we get out of supporting Putin in Chechnya? He may need to do it to maintain his country, but we don't need to support what looks like a rape, pillage, and kill campaign against Muslims. The other area is Israel and Palestine. We're not going to abandon the Israelis but we need to reestablish the relationship so it looks like we're the great power and they're our ally, and not the other way around. We need to create a situation where moderate Muslims can express support for the United States without being laughed off the block.

link: http://www.harpers.[...]

Bush's Psychopathic Tendencies on Display

Thanks to Eugene Robinson, who brings us this perspective of President Bush's Monday press conference.

According to the Iraqi government, 3,438 civilians were killed in July, making it the bloodiest month since the invasion. The president was asked yesterday whether the failure of the U.S.-backed "unity" government to stem the orgy of sectarian carnage disappoints him, and he said that no, it didn't. How, I wonder, is that possible? Does he believe it would be a sign of weakness to admit that the flowering of democracy in Iraq isn't going exactly as planned? Does he believe saying everything's just fine will make it so? Is he in denial? Or do 3,438 deaths really just roll off his back after he's had his workout and a nice bike ride?

Here's a link to the rest: http://www.washingtonpost[...]

I am pretty much disgusted. This is shock and awe.

Also, I'd like to point to a piece by Peter Dyer, over at consortiumnews.com. Here's an excerpt followed by a link:

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On June 13, the Pew Research Group released a poll based on interviews with 17,500 people in 15 countries including the U.S. The poll showed that people in European and Muslim countries see U.S. policy in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran's nuclear program.

Because of the disdain of American leaders for international law, manifested so vividly in U.S. aggression in Iraq, the international moral authority of the United States is at an all-time low. The post-World War II vision of a world without war, embodied in the United Nations Charter, has never seemed more out of reach.

Aggression (initiating an unprovoked war) was formally outlawed in 1945 by the Nuremberg Charter (Article VI(a)), a treaty signed and largely written by the United States. And although the Nuremberg Charter was formed for the specific purpose of trying Nazi war criminals, the words of the judgment make clear the intent of the court that the Nuremberg principles must apply to all nations and for all time.

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. ... Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.”

In 1945, the U.S. also signed the United Nations Charter, a document which was nothing if not an attempt by the world community, as the first sentence states: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” To that end the Charter clearly and specifically forbids violations of the sovereignty of any state by any other state, except in immediate self-defense (Article 2, Sec. 4 and Articles 39 and 51).

And in December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 95 (1), affirming “the principles of International law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal.”

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution includes the Supremacy Clause which makes all treaties signed and ratified by the U.S. the “supreme law of the land.” Because the invasion of Iraq violated the Nuremberg Charter and the U.N. Charter it also violated the U.S. Constitution. Sadly, President Bush’s disdain for many international treaties which the U.S. has ratified has made a mockery of his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” But Article VI has not been repealed. It’s still the law.

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link: http://www.consortiumnews[...]

I agree Peter, and I have been saying this for a while. We need to impeach, convict Bush and put him someplace where he has an opportunity to right his wrongs, or at least not do anymore harm.

Request for Feedback

I have recently changed the URL for this blog, from rightleftwrongright.blogspot.com to robwhitlock.blogspot.com. I also changed the title, from "Bazz Fazz Flong Jompers" to "These are the Times."

I felt that the url, rightleft... was dualistic and too divisive. I changed the title because "Bazz Fazz..." was meant to be a temporary fix when I began moving away from the right v. left crap.

What do you think about the change?

Capitol Forest (Black Hills) from Olympia's Eastside

Real Security by way of Sustainability

The path to real security runs along the river of sustainability. Real security cannot be reached through destruction - a vague war against terrorism - which has no forseeable concrete success. Besides the fact that the war on terror is only exacerbating the problem of international terrorism, inciting otherwise civil individuals, and groups, into acts of violence.

The author of this article, Alex Steffen, concludes, "The time has come to stop living in fear , and start building a better world."

I agree.

Bright Green Security
Alex Steffen
August 18, 2006

For the last five years, we’ve been kept in a panic state over terrorism, told constantly that it not only presents an immediate threat to ourselves and the ones we love, but is a danger to our very civilization. The result has been both that extremists have been more successful in spreading fear and authoritarian politicians have used this opportunity to reduce government transparency while eroding protections for human rights and the democratic process.

But is terrorism really the biggest threat facing the United States? And is more military spending really likely to make us safer?

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link: Bright Green Security

The White House, Despicable and Conniving

By the way, the Iraq war is still fraudulent.