Henry Kissinger -- the name could be a metonym for dishonest defense of imperialism and reckless disregard for the consequences of military action, and so it's no surprise to hear him tell us to ignore the consensus of all 16 US intelligence agencies that there is no evidence Iran is building or is about to build nuclear weapons.
Yes, of course they could all be wrong and there is always the argument from cliche that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but even in a nation of emotionally disturbed amnesiacs like the US, some might want to remember our useless attack and occupation of Iraq for which we continue to suffer and will continue to suffer for a very long time. In case you don't remember, that country had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons or the materials or technology needed to produce huge, heavy nuclear prototypes much less the probably fictional "suitcase" bombs we were told could be smuggled into the US at any moment. Act now!
On CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria yesterday, Kissinger told us he was "uneasy" with the intelligence and that we should ignore it as we ignored the lies about Iraq and make the presumption that a bomb was forthcoming.
“I am very uneasy with the so-called intelligence report that say we don’t know whether they are actually working on nuclear weapons. I think we should start from the premise that they are undergoing all this in order to achieve a military capability. I don’t think that is a disputable point.”
I think it is disputable in the extreme, considering that we're listening to a war criminal involved in and culpable for massacres, invasions and genocides in Indochina, East Timor, Chile, Cyprus and Bangladesh talking about fomenting yet another dubious and probably disastrous war.
Kissinger and warmongering toadies like Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu tell us we have no time to lose; that the time to attack is now as Former Secretary of State Rice once told us. Shoot first and pretend there is no question to ask, lest the "smoking gun" of evidence turn out to be a mushroom cloud. Frankly I think we have everything to lose, including our future and any basis upon which to base the proposition and pose of being a force for good in this world.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. -- James Joyce
There are some laws which everyone, no matter how powerful, no matter their nationality, must obey. I’m thinking of the laws of physics: gravity, the laws of thermodynamics and the like. No one gets a pass, at least not for long, not without exacting a price. Yes, we can fly to the moon, but it takes an enormous amount of energy to slip these surly bonds of earth, and we always come back.
There are similar laws which operate on the metaphysical plane--I call them spiritual laws but for the non-religious, how about “Eternal Laws.” Just as no one escapes the laws of gravity and thermodynamics, no one escapes Eternal Laws, either.
Religious texts of all faiths are full of them, and they serve as both a warning and guide to those of us here on earth. They know no nationality or creed but instead are truly universal. Just as the laws of gravity apply equally to a child on a playground or a multibillion-dollar rocket aimed at the moon, so do these Eternal Laws apply to great nations and individuals alike.
One of these is the Law of Karma. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this law is expressed as “the sins of the father.” There are dozens of verses in the Old and New Testament expressing the idea that what goes around, comes around. For example, from Numbers 14:18:
‘The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’
I repeat: No one gets a pass, at least not for long, not without exacting a price.
A related law is the Law of Truth. Nothing remains secret forever. Eventually the truth is revealed, if not today or tomorrow, then in a year, 10 years, 50 years. In the New Testament we see this expressed in Luke 8:17:
For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.
There are similar ideas in the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other religious texts. In short: Repent ye sinners or pay the price. The longer you wait, the worse it will be.
America has been dodging Eternal Laws. We are wont to do this every now and then, for example our failure to atone for our genocide of native peoples. Little surprise that these chickens came home to roost in 1973. We have a lot of karmic debt which has gone unpaid, and the interest is adding up.
The latest is our reluctance to address the biggest moral failing this nation has faced since the days of slavery. We have swept our rush to war under the rug, ignored our imprisonment and torture of hundreds of innocent people. We have refused to acknowledge the use of ginned up confessions to justify our slaughter in a foreign land. We have chosen to believe that the shredding of civil liberties here at home is necessary in the interest of “national security” because we are emotionally lazy and perhaps still a little shell-shocked.
This week a new revelation popped up and, surprise surprise, we slapped it away. It came in the form of this story:
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
These people were tortured. They were labeled “the worst of the worst.” They were in legal limbo, denied contact with their families, lawyers, etc. And did I mention they were tortured?
So far a Google News search of “Wilkerson, Guantanamo, Bush, Cheney” has revealed nothing from our mainstream national media on this story. Lefty blogs, Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, foreign media like Arab News and Asian Tribune have covered it. CNN, the Associated Press, New York Times? Not so much.
So it appears our media is reluctant to look under that rock. Our government, of course, has refused to look into the sins of the past administration. And our church leaders? The Catholic Church is too busy dealing with the consequences of its own failure to adhere to the Law of Truth. Lefty evangelical Jim Wallis is doing battle with clown Glenn Beck right now; he has chosen a media circus sideshow over addressing a true moral dilemma.
So here we are.
We need a national accountability moment, a “time of repentance” if you will, where all is revealed once and for all. Will we get it? Yes, of course we will: it’s an Eternal Law that this moment will come. The question is, will that time be of our choosing or the universe’s? The universe is a harsh task mistress. It would be better for us to address this issue ourselves. But if we don’t have the courage, well, there are universal laws at play here. The debt will be paid -- with interest.
We seem to have forgotten about torture. Comedians and far right shamans still make jokes about how those still left in the cages at Guantanamo are the "worst of the worst." People are heavily against giving them any amenities like flu shots and some have the audacity to say we treat them too well, even though so many of them have never had any case proved against them or have been cleared: so many are guilty of little more than being Muslim or accused of something by an enemy.
That Dick Cheney, the once and in his own mind future Führer pokes fun at the idea that we ever engaged in torturing prisoners and although he's not well liked by any but the most extreme subhumans, he has never suffered any consequences for having directed and promoted things we used to hang people for when I was a boy: kidnapping, torture and murder. Republicans prefer to believe him, many of the rest of us believe so much in our essential virtue that we just don't want to hear any more of it.
It's not that there is no evidence of the Bush Administration's capital crimes, not at all. We have imprisoned and tortured many people with essentially no evidence against them, but there has been a constant flow of increasingly horrible information about kidnapping and the kind of torture even Limbaugh or Dick the Impaler himself couldn't pass off as a frat-boy prank. Crain Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan now tells us, says Raw Story, that the people the CIA sent to secret dungeons there were raped with broken bottles and/or boiled alive until they "admitted" to being affiliated with Al Qaida. Some were forced to watch their children being tortured and all so that the Bush administration could justify destroying Iraq to the eager war lovers back home.
"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,"
"I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."
I'm not ashamed to say that I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed not so much by the monsters and tyrants and murderers of children some of us still revere as heroes and patriots, but by the way we still support what they did, still can't accept the horror, don't want to be told about it, still want to continue crimes as hideous as any ever committed, because after all, these people are "suspects." These people are "the worst of the worst" whether guilty or not and most of all they aren't Christian, like us. It's not really important anyway, not like gay marriage or insurance company profits or ACORN or tax breaks for Cheney and Bush.
Barack Obama is not trying to set up government death panels as the idiot Palin has told us, but he sure as hell is continuing to employ Blackwater Death Squads. I believe this to be the most dangerous, if not the most sinister development in American history. Comparisons between the state of our union and the collapsing Roman Empire are a dime a dozen, but when mercenaries begin to outnumber regular military, it becomes a threat and when the mercenaries have an objective which includes an evangelist theocracy, when they openly indulge in orgies, child prostitution, murder, destruction of evidence, illegal arms dealing, money laundering, tax evasion and armed mayhem with impunity while arrogantly refusing to allow congress to examine their books -- the threat demands that overused Roman comparison.
Such use of mercenary troops, immune from Congressional oversight and legal obligation, may or may not be unconstitutional, but it is, in my opinion, unconscionable.
The contract with Blackwater and its subsidiaries was set to expire in May, however the Obama administration has now decided to temporarily extend it through September, according to The Nation. Barack Obama needs to end this danger immediately. If we cannot raise sufficient troops to maintain our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to get out now, because the presence of heavily armed, privately owned military forces loyal to who knows whom in the United States may be the biggest threat to national survival since the Civil War.
“I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live, They’re just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I’m concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me.”
says Forrest Fogarty. He's an Iraq War veteran and a lifelong Nazi. Despite being covered in Racist and Nazi tattoos and despite having been expelled from High School for overt and unrepentant racism; despite his public support for ridding the US and Europe of non-white races, despite the fact that regulations forbid it, the US military has trained him in weapons and tactics he hopes one day to use in a race war.
Writing in Salon.com, Matt Kennard tells us in Neo-Nazis are in the Army Now that Fogarty left the US Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge and was asked to re-enlist. He is apparently not a unique case and a DHS report outlines how as the military has had to scrape the bottom of the recruitment barrel, issuing waivers for criminal behavior, militant extremist groups have benefitted from the increased hate and frustration - and the government's willingness to train current and potential hate-group members.
It's become very difficult for Americans to criticize the military and the image of our "warrior" heroes fighting for freedom is a sacred icon, as it often becomes when our government has to hide and distract from the lies and distortions and cover-ups behind an unneccesary and probably illegal war, but it seems to me that another of the victims of George Bush's War, along with the Iraqi people, is our military and its reputation. It's bad enough that we've abused their patriotism and dedication, left too many wounded by the side of the road without adequate care and benefits, but have we trained and disciplined another generation of domestic terrorists to carry out a racist, hate-based mission?
GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?
BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
How does an “intelligence failure” explain the administration’s attempt to discredit and smear former Ambassador Joe Wilson, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, and other critics of administration policy?
How does an “intelligence failure” justify the 50,993 Iraqi civilian casualties (as counted by the Shiite government since April 2005)?
How does one explain “intelligence failure” to the 30,634 wounded soldiers now neglected by a government-on-the-cheap, just like the Vietnam era vets who were abandoned a generation ago?
What intelligence justified the dismissal of 350,000 Iraqi Army personnel who, after being turned out of their jobs and unemployed, had little recourse but to join the ranks of the insurgency?
How can one so easily dismiss the “tactical errors, thousands of them,” admitted by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice during a visit to Blackburn England in 2006?
How can one justify the loss of 4,207 American lives since the beginning of the Iraq War? On screen, the number 4,207 looks something like this:
m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m 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m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m
After the WMD argument proved bogus, the Bush administration advanced yet another false premise to justify themselves: The “pied piper” argument. The one that states: “We are fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” When intelligence fails, “staying the course” is the cowardly way to avoid owning the mistake.
Overall, the Administration rushed our soldiers into an ad hoc, itchy-trigger-finger war predicated on false intelligence, errors in judgment, gross mismanagement, and no exit strategy. When citizens demanded truth and accountability, the administration countered with subterfuge and smear.
Finally, here is George Bush at a White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 cracking jokes about his “intelligence failure:”
"Those weapons of mass destruction gotta be somewhere. Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here."
Only a roomful of sycophants and sociopaths could find this amusing.
Now the War-Criminal-In-Chief intends to spin his own history. Over my dead body!
