Andrew Sullivan Calls On Bush To Acknowledge Torture

One of the saddest, most depressing, and most poignant facts of my life right now is that I have friends who still don't acknowledge that the torture of prisoners under American interrogators was ordered at the very top of the US government. The best friend that I have ever had doesn't seem to grasp the concept that just because Bush was outraged when the Abu Ghraib photos hit the press, that doesn't mean he wasn't behind the orders that produced them. It's maddening...we're not accusing Bush of being behind 9/11, or of Obama not being a citizen...the Senate Armed Services Committee and the International Red Cross have found that this was a systematic list of procedures and techniques to be used as routine interrogation techniques. NOT for any "ticking bomb" scenarios like on 24. And Bush knew about it, and acknowledged it in public. And yet, I still can't get him to see it.

It could be worse, though. One of my relatives shouted me down when I so much as used the word torture in conversation by demanding to know, "WERE YOU THERE?!?!?!" Answer: no, I wasn't. You weren't there at Pearl Harbor, or Gettysburg, or Golgatha, either, for that matter. The basic facts remain: American investigators tortured prisoners.

And a finer dissemination of the facts and a laying-out of the evidence than Andrew Sullivan's "Dear President Bush" you will not find on this Earth. It deserves to be held up to a level of near-reverence as any writing by Thomas Paine. He lays it all out for Bush, the entire torture timeline, and then cuts to the chase:

"The model is Ronald Reagan, who denied he had ever traded arms for hostages in Iran but eventually realized that that was indeed the consequence of the actions he took, the men he appointed, and the policy he pursued. Reagan’s speech to the nation on this matter was, in my view, his greatest, because it revealed humility and integrity. “First, let me say,” he told us in 1987,

"I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior … A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

"If you read the Red Cross report and the Senate Armed Services Committee report, I believe you will reach a similar conclusion about your own record on prisoner treatment. You may not have intended to torture people, but you did; you may have wanted to protect the country within the law, but that admirable desire too easily slid into your approval of actions that are indefensible, illegal, and deeply damaging to America’s reputation and honor. You were let down, as Reagan was. He took responsibility. You need to as well."

Read the whole thing, end to end. Then go back and do it a second time. Even more.

Those of you who have scorned us for questioning the war in Iraq, denounced us as "with the terrorists," questioning our patriotism and even our sanity, have no excuses any more. You are in league with those who approved of the worst mistreatment of human beings as is possible to inflict. Killing some of these people would have been merciful by comparison. The fact that they were terrorists and baby-killers doesn't matter--we are America, and we are supposed to be better than this. We can stand firm in the knowledge that our patriotism is the true version: a patriotism and love of our country strong enough and fearless enough that we will criticize our country when it is wrong and call for its leaders to do the right thing.

I hope Bush does it someday. If for no other--purely vindictive reason--I want to see the rug ripped out from under Cheney.

Olbermann: What DOES The Bible Say About War?

Recent documents have come forth showing that Donald Rumsfeld deliberately manipulated that Christian fanatic of a president of his into going into war with Iraq. Now, it turns out Bush left the president of France scratching his head, too...

"[There] are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins,” Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the biblical reference. Romer first revealed his account in a 2007 article for the university review, Allez savoir, which passed largely unnoticed.

Chirac, in a new book by French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, is quoted as confirming the surreal conversation, saying he was stupefied by Bush’s reference to biblical prophecy and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”"

Wow. Just...wow. No wonder the right-wingers hate the French...they can smell bullshit when exposed to it.

Keith Olbermann recently had Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, to talk about this. Gaddy basically says what us freethinkers have known all along--you can quote-mine the Bible to justify any position you want to take (except the fact that there is no God, but that's another discussion).

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POTUS gets pwnd

International newspapers take their parting shots at President Bush.

"A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job," said Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: "The Failure." "He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage."

What do you mean, has become intolerant? You haven't been paying close attention, have you?

Good riddance. Be sure to use the disinfectant liberally.

Prosecute Bush/Cheney

Anyone who supports the job Bush has done on the "war on terror" in his administration needs to read this outstanding summary by Joe Klein of Time. And I hope they have the guts to view the photographs in the links at the bottom.

US Senate: Bush is the torture president

This report is bi-partisan, unequivocal, and damning. Bush knew about torture, and actively authorized it. John McCain's signature is on the report, as is every other Republican member of that committee. This is not a matter of a Democratic-controlled Senate taking potshots at an outgoing Republican president. This is a universal condemnation by leaders of BOTH parties. Andrew Sullivan's take is here. And I agree with every single word:

"Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves. The man who authorized the technique shown below is the president of the United States:"

Me again: I want to make a few things about this post abundantly clear. First, yes, I'm a passionate hater of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. I hate them so much I cannot stand to look at them. They are disgusting plutocrats who care for nothing but absolute power (Cheney maintained his stock holdings in Haliburton while they were being awarded non-competitive bids to rebuild Iraq, which made him even more obscenely wealthy than he already was. Add "war profiteer" to his list of crimes). I detest them in the same way I detest all of their lot throughout history. But I have reasons to hate them. They have disgraced our country in a way we have seldom seen. They have authorized TORTURE, a clear violation of American law, the Geneva conventions, common decency, and CHRISTIAN VIRTUE. Not that such virtue matters to me, per se, but I'm throwing that out there for the sake of certain people in my life who have chided me (if not reamed me out) for my hatred of Bush/Cheney as being "unChristian."

You're assuming they're true Christians in the first place. And you're assuming that hatred and Christianity are mutually incompatible.

But I digress...the facts are this: Bush and Cheney are criminals. They should be in prison. They have disgraced a country I love (however much I may bitch about it and however angry and disgusted it makes me at times). They deserve to be punished, shamed, and degraded for all time. They divided us for the sake of political divide-and-conquer tactics at a time when they could have made the most of the unity brought about by the 9/11 attacks. Bush said, "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists." To which I say, sir, that true patriotism is the ability to criticize your country when it is in the wrong. It's like a marriage: you tell your spouse they're embarrassing you because you love them, not despite that. And fuck you for calling us un-American, sir, when you crapped on the Bill of Rights and spied on Americans unlawfully.



And before you accuse me of shitting on "the troops," I say this: There have been plenty of honorable, brave people conducting themselves in this war in the finest tradition of the American military. But my admiration stops when certain people stoop to this kind of conduct. You are at that instant the perpetrator of atrocity, not a soldier doing your duty. And there are numerous accounts of people refusing, most notably JAG lawyers who resigned rather than prosecute Guantanamo inmates whose confessions had been tortured out of them.

I have other friends who say that we need time to let history judge Bush. To which I retort: William Shirer met the same resistance to his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There are some instances in which the facts are so clear, so unequivocal, and so shameful that we need to confront them immediately (which is more than I can say for most of the mainstream media and the White House press corps collectively). This is a blight on our nation's history that needs to be dealt with right now, not after we know whether or not the intel for going into Iraq was valid at the time (that's another blog post). It's how we conducted ourselves afterward that showed that we were led by the same type of monsters that al-Qaeda recruits were taught to believe we were run by.

And you will never, ever, change my mind about any of this, so don't even try.

Olbermann on Bush's historical legacy

Maybe the best one-stop shopping place for the dishonor that is our outgoing President:

Matt Yglesias: Good Riddance

I agree with every word:

(W)e got what we got. Not because the political coalition of which Bush was a part was so rotten that nothing else could happen, but in large part because he was so rotten that he drove or suppressed the best elements of his coalition and spread the rot around.