Lying liars and the wars they cause

So the Iraqi defector Curveball finally admitted his lies, the lies that took us and other countries to war.  The war that's made our national debt soar.  The war that's taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and maimed and shattered the lives of countless others.  The war that in part took our civil liberties from us in the name of protecting us from terrorism.

The bastard finally admits he made all that shit up so we would go in and remove Saddam Hussein from his country for him.  And his lies were the central reason Bush and Cheney and their gaggle of blood thirsty pig fuckers gave for going to war.  And Bush and Cheney and their cabal of war boosters knew his lies were lies and they took us to war anyway.

All those people dead, millions of Iraqis homeless and displaced for most likely forever.  Hundreds of thousands of our military people have had their lives shattered, their physical being shattered, their minds ripped and riddled with PTSD because of the lies told by this Iraqi scumbag and because Bush and Cheney took his lies and built a case for war based on them.

Can we prosecute all of them now?  Is it not evident that the whole thing is a huge crime against humanity?  Will the Waffler in chief in the White House put his Attorney General on this?  The Iraq war has been a debacle from the start, a disaster that's still affecting us.  It's bankrupted us and made us less safe.  It's past time for those who led us into it to be tried for their crimes.  And now with the admission of the defector, we have most all the evidence we need to prove how guilty the men at the top are.  It's a fucking crying shame that I'll win the Mega Millions and the Powerball jackpots before those lying murdering thieving bastards go on trial for their crimes. 

Due process, schmoo process

Obama has kept the worst parts of Bush/Cheney's illegal wars of terror on our civil liberties and he's gone them one step further. Now he's killing American citizens with impunity and no one on seems to care much.

Now I'm sure Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't a nice guy and he very probably meant Americans harm and he may have plotted to kill citizens of this country. And the world may be a better off place in the wake of his state sanctioned murder but one thing still stands out about his death: he was a citizen of the United States of America and as such he was entitled to due process of law, which meant that he had a right to face his accuser in court, a right to defend himself, and he was innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I don't give a shit what the CIA or some shadowy military intelligence outfit said he did or didn't do, he was a citizen of the USA and that means he had rights. It doesn't matter that he lived in Yemen and said shit about the USA, he was still a citizen and he had a right to free speech, which means he could say what he liked. It doesn't matter if you hated what he said, he had a right to say it.

What matters here is that whoever is in the White House can, under the Bush/Cheney/Obama rules of war, determine who is and who isn't a terrorist and then they can murder them without having to put them on trial in a court of law. This is what Bush hath wrought. This is what we've become, a nation of bloodthirsty savages who are no better than the people we claim to hate and fear and have gone to war against. We have met the enemy and he is us.

I trust the intelligence gathered by the CIA about as much as I like organized religion. Intelligence has and always will be manipulated and twisted to fit the whims of those in power. If one day Obama or whoever takes office after him one day reads my blog and decides that he doesn't like it, he can call me a terrorist and fire a drone at my home. He can have me clapped into irons and taken to Gitmo. And I can't fight it. I won't have the rights that so many men and women fought for for so many years because the rules have changed, they were changed by a little thing called the Patriot Act. Remember that? Remember how Obama was going to roll that back? Yeah, how'd that go for us? About as well as his promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts.

The process of turning the presidency into an imperial branch of government that answers to no one that began with Nixon really got it's legs during the Bush/Cheney years and now it's being driven even further under Obama. And that is one of the main reasons why I will never vote for Obama again.

I'm ashamed of what our nation has become. I'm ashamed of Obama. I'm ashamed that hardly anyone is ashamed. We've become what we were supposed to be fighting against. And the sad fact is, we'll never ever go back to 'normal.'

Where's George?

I went to my local corporate bookstore yesterday to look for a few things and I ended up doing a good deed. I helped George W's new book find it's rightful place on the shelves.

It was sitting in the 'New Books' section when I walked in and that didn't seem right so I took it here:But since he's not really a Christian because after all a real Christian wouldn't condone torture, start a war for oil, and be so awful and heartless towards the poor and working people, so I moved the book on to this section...
Alcoholism is a disease after all. And once and alcoholic, always an alcoholic. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt, he may have quit drinking after that last binge in Germany when he gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel that awkward back rub. So I pressed onwards to find George W a new home...
It didn't seem right to leave him in this section because as a nation we're a long way off from recovering from what he did to us. So we pressed onward...

He seemed at home here because of all the lies he told us while in office. Remember the fiction of that big 'Mission Accomplished ' banner? Even he regrets that fiction now. But still it didn't seem quite right to make that section his final home. So we went looking for a more suitable place...
Finally! Jackpot! Bingo! He was right at home in the 'True Crime' section because when all is said and done his crimes were truly many, he dragged us into two wars, he let corporate greed and corruption go unchecked, he let military contractors rape us and Iraq and Afghanistan, and he let the USA suffer it's most horrific terrorist attack while in office.

So rest easy little George W book, you're finally in the area of the bookstore you can truly call home!

Tsars in my eyes

Hey, remember when the guy who got us into two wars at the same time said he needed a 'war Czar' to help him run them even though he was supposed to be doing it because he was the Commander in Chief?
It's a good thing he's not in office anymore because he might appoint a Czar to make sure the war Czar was doing the job that he was supposed to be doing in the first place.

I wish President Obama would appoint a war crimes Czar who had the power to investigate all the lies Bush told to get us into and keep us in those disastrous wars. Maybe they'd let that Czar waterboard all the people in the Bush administration who allowed others to torture and maim others in order to get all that false intelligence that they used to take us into war. I'd love to see Bush, Dick Cheney, John Woo, and the rest of them gagging, coughing, and spitting water after they get waterboarded.

Disgusting

The more we find out about what the Bush/Cheney administration did to get "intelligence" out of detainees in Iraq and at Gitmo, the more disgusted and sick I become. And so should you.

The bottom line is water boarding is torture. We tried and convicted Japanese military personnel for doing it during World War 2, and we called it a war crime when they did it. They want to call it 'enhanced interrogation' when we our CIA and military does it? It suddenly becomes all right when it's done by non Asian people? Bull shit. If it was wrong for the Japanese to do it to our men, it's wrong for our country to do it to 'terrorists.' They fact is they, John Yoo, Bybee, and the rest of the Bush lackeys, changed the definition of torture so their idiot leader George W could parse his hypocritical words and say what we were doing wasn't torture, but it was. Everyone knows it was and the full light of disclosure needs to be shone on the whole mess.

And then what needs to happen is that the Obama administration needs to prosecute all of those involved, that is to say the ones who gave the orders and who came up with the twisted definitions of torture, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This notion of not doing it because we need to look forward and not backward is nonsense. How can we look forward if we remain blind to justice and the rule of law? The previous administration broke the law, they didn't just change a policy as Karl Rove and the rest of the pundit village claim they did, the broke the law, they broke with hundreds of years of precedent, they took a shit on the law and they rubbed our noses in it and they need to be brought to justice for doing that. And thank goodness there are some in Congress who are calling for just that, and here's one of them:

Oh how I wish spitfire Debbie Wasserman Schultz was my Congress person. Or Dennis Kucinich, or Maxine Waters, oh if only I had someone who had the balls (or ovaries as the case may be) to stand up to the banality of evil that was Bush/Cheney/Rove and call for their prosecution.

People like Schultz, Waters and Kucinich almost make up for the craven cowards like Stenny Hoyer and Jane Harman who said that damn it we had to let Bush and company spy on us for our own good. Now when it comes to light that the NSA was listening to Jane Harman's phone conversation's she and Hoyer suddenly find some outrage? Bullshit. If we'd listened to Wasserman Schultz and Kucinich then maybe Bush's illegal spying wouldn't have gotten so out of hand and maybe they could have done something about the torturing too.

It's comical now to see Dick Cheney claim that the torturing he did worked. As usual, the old ghoul is wrong. It didn't work. If it did then they would have had to water board those guys over 180 times. If it had worked then the war on terror would have been over years ago when all that intelligence they got was used to round up Bin Laden and all the members of his terrorist organization. If it had worked then all the terrorist groups in the world would have thrown their hands up in resignation and they would have surrendered and Cheney would have shot them in the face for fun, like he did to his hunting buddy.

The fact is torture doesn't do anything but create more terrorists and more hatred for the USA. It only serves to make us look bad and it made us sink to the same level as the North Koreans and the Serbs. If we want to regain any shred of credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world or if we want to regain a tiny morsel of the high ground we used to live on, then the Obama administration needs to stop pussyfooting around and they need to go after the people in the former administration who committed the war crimes. They've got to stop continuing the Bush era policy of claiming state secrets prevent the fair and open trials of the so called terrorists and they've got to let those men defend themselves in open court. If they don't then they're just as bad as Bush and Cheney, in fact they will be their accomplices in war crimes.

Way to go Peru!

If they can find their former democratically elected leader guilty of crimes against humanity, then surely we can at least put Bush and Cheney on trial.



Thanks for being the American leader in justice Peru!