Bush is the dissembler
“In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic] — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.” –President Bush at May 31 press conference
Do the FBI agents who have reported seeing the horrendous conditions to which Gitmo prisoners have been subjected “disassemble” too, Mr. Bush? Or is the rottenest apple at the top of the barrel? Read through these documents [updated link, 2/20/2006] and judge for yourself.
Administration lies denying the intentional nature of the atrocities are flowing like water following the 2005 Annual Report of Amnesty International that called US torture center at Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our times.”
Let’s get one thing straight right off. Ripping people out of their home countries into a permanent imprisonment half-way around the world without trial — at a site specifically chosen by American jailers so that international and domestic law could be sidestepped — is on the face of it torture. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the rest of their minions have in the design and operation of their torture centers, dispensed with 790 years of enlightened concepts of how criminals and other enemies should be treated. Bush has indeed created exactly what Amnesty International says — a gulag every bit as ugly in its own way as a Soviet-era gulag.
The whole damn thing is rotten. In my opinion, President Bush is culpable for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. But so far no one is holding anyone accountable. Who is it that hates thinking America should be a beacon of international law?
June 1st, 2005 at 19:46
Depp, you ought to listen to the debate at DemocracyNow between Rvkin (barf) and Amnest’s William Schulz. Very, very enlightening. I admire Schulz’s composure when dealing the Rivkin beast, very nice…
Incidentally, returning to the former Uzbek colleague I had, non one has heard anything from him since his deportation…S’very sad. I also began reading a Swedish/Uzbekistan trade deal document the other day. I’m stunned by all of this.
June 2nd, 2005 at 04:04
Yes, I heard that today. Frightening how that Rivkin promotes the notion of the “evil men” the Republicans were so fond of using during the Gonzales debate. They have carved out a class of human being for whom due process and human rights do not apply. And who is a “terrorist” is decided by secret means, maybe just a purchased pointing of the finger. This could happen to any of us. Scary!
June 2nd, 2005 at 07:32
Quite, I mean this notion of there being incarnate “evil” men underlies the theological ideology incarnate the Bush doctrine. If you are able to label all and everyone as “evil” in the so-called “war on terror” you are then able to throw off the gloves since within the minds of half of the populous you’ve created the illusion that there are clear boundaries between good and evil. Furthermore, evil acts of terrorism are not classified as such if you belong to the “good” “peace-loving” nations of the world blah, blah, bullshit. But I suppose complexity disturbs the emperor who constantly arrogates him the right to play God.
I remember Chomsky uncovering a subtle ambiguity in one the Bush Admin’s chosen epithets for its military escapades around the world. He said that the term “Enduring Freedom” contained a subtle wmabiguity in that to endure can also mean to suffer. I did laugh…
June 3rd, 2005 at 16:21
This article in the Washington Post undermines the “bad men” argument wingnuts/Republicans use to defend their detention of Muslims — people were sold to the Americans to be shipped to the gulags.
June 6th, 2005 at 10:09
I read in my local evening newspaper (The Evening Argus, Brighton, England) about a 35-year-old Libyan man who has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Omar Deghayes has as yet not been charged with any crime, but in the Orwellian nether region of the Bush Administration where international law does not apply, where the Geneva convention does not apply and where rules and regulations can be dispensed with we are, to quote one David Rivkin, “releasing people because we’re humanitarian, we’re compassionate”. For Omar Deghayes, however, this outpouring of “humantarianism”, when pointing to its true correlate in Bush lingua, namely torture, is described as follows in the Evening Argus, a Brighton newspaper:
The prisoner [Omar] complained of having a hose stuck up his nose until he was drowning, electric shock torture and being placed in a room painted with black and white stripes, containing a glass wall, behind which were snakes.
Mr Stafford Smith added his client had been told his wife would be
sold into prostitution when he was first taken into custody.
This is all further proof that Amnesty’s usage of the term Gulag, to describe to the US prison archipelago across the Middle East and elsewhere, was correct. And even if the head of Amnesty may be accused of a degree of hyperbole, no doubt engendered by the horrors described by former Gitmo inmates, he can in no shape or form be accused of downright mendacity, the likes of which we have been exposed from Rivkin and his neocon coalition in recent years.
It is vitally important that more and more of these tragic accounts are reported, so that the body of evidence may one day overwhelm lackies of the Bush war and mold public opinion and, who knows, shape future policy decisions.
June 6th, 2005 at 10:23
Deep, I’ve posted you a corrected version of the above…
February 15th, 2007 at 01:43
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