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Like father, like daughter. Once a political hack, always a political hack. Guess who is back? The Torture Queen herself!
Over the weekend, Liz Cheney went to some political gathering called Smart Girls Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. She brought with her all the political baggage she’s been lugging around with her since her father was forced out of his undisclosed location because of term limits. There were a couple of other rightwinger geniuses there like Michelle Malkin and Representative Marsha Blackburn to go along with the superior genius of Liz Cheney but, outside of some off the wall bloggers and a stray NYT reporter, this little shindig got no press coverage whatsoever. Perhaps it was because no one there said anything worth repeating. Perhaps it was because we’ve heard all this rightwing claptrap before. Whatever the reason, this was nothing more than a backslapping, everybody agree with everybody else gathering of people who are still stuck in the mindset of the last administration.
What was still the same old same old was the message from Liz Cheney: torture works. She may have talked about something else but this was the message that came thru loud and clear to me. Ignoring the fact that torture is illegal here in America no matter what John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington may have said at one time, Liz Cheney still thinks that the best way to defeat the bad guys is to act just like them. The old eye for an eye stuff. Right.
Liz seems to think that waterboarding is legal despite the fact that this government prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs during WW II for doing that very action. The legal precedent is clear to everyone except the NeoCons like Liz who think the law does not apply to them or if they change the wording of a legal opinion that it changes the law as if by magic. Sorry. It doesn’t quite work that way. In fact, it’s never worked that way. Calling torture by another name doesn’t change a thing. You’ve just put another name on amounts to torture. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques is still torture no matter what euphemism you want to use. It’s the same stuff that Saddam used on his own people and we invaded him over less. Our law says you cannot torture people. There are no justifiable excuses.
But here she is, in public, bashing President Obama for not allowing torture to be used anymore and here is Liz Cheney still thinking that “24” is a reflection of real life and that the bad guys have set up a doomsday device and we have less than a day to find it and disarm it so we need to use torture to find out the truth from recently captured and fully informed terrorists. Remind me to never let Liz watch Dukes Of Hazzard because she’ll start believing that cars can fly and all southern sheriffs are stupid. God help us if she ever watches the A Team and begins to think that bad guys can be disabled and disarmed by shooting heads of cabbage at them. Some things are too stupid to be believed but not according to Dick’s daughter. Torture works in CheneyWorld even though there is no evidence to back that up.
The destruction of America’s world standing because of this ignorant, uncivilized belief in torturing prisoners is long lasting and these unrepentant ignoramuses want Liz to run for office someday soon? Oh, God, would that wish come true so the public can give her the beatdown that her daddy never gave her for being so fucking stupid. Seems like stupidity is in the Cheney genes. Like I said, like father, like daughter.
The election of Barack Obama has removed this as a hot button issue. Unfortunately, it still goes on despite our lack of attention being paid to it. I am speaking of course of the War in Iraq. Today marks the anniversary of the beginning of this fiasco six long years ago. It is the legacy that George Bush will spend the rest of his life running away from and may just be his personal undoing if someone ever has the balls to bring him up on those well-deserved war crimes charges.
The lies that have been told about our involvement in this unjustified war have been astounding. The denials of responsibility have been equally as astounding. The revisionist history flows like water from all the NeoCons now that history has proven them wrong on every account. (Don’t you just love how NeoCons develop a theory and then cherry-pick facts to fit their theory instead of using the scientific approach to formulating theories which is first gathering facts and THEN coming up with the theory? It would explain why they are wrong so often…)
Richard Clarke wrote about George Bush’s desire to hang the catastrophe of 9-11 on Saddam right from the very beginning (before any real facts had been established). From that point on the intel that was coming in to the Bush administration was corrupted to point to Saddam as the villain and only Saddam as the villain. The Bushbots all deny it now because they see what those lies got them but they did link Saddam to 9-11 even though it wasn’t true.
It was at this point that the influence of Paul Wolfowitz shone thru to the Chimpster. Instead of continuing the age old policy of containing our enemies and allow them to stew in their own juices until they implode or wither away, these brilliant NeoCon chickenhawks came up with the policy of preemption which basically means that now we just go to war with countries we feel threatened by instead of peacefully working to disarm or nullify the threat. It was saber rattling transmogrified into war mongering.
The boy genius Paul Wolfowitz was so convinced that Saddam’s people were corrupt, evil and worthless that he persuaded the Chimpster that disbanding all civil authority was a good idea. So, after the American invasion, everyone who worked in civil authority or the military was let go never to return. The results were immediate and disastrous. Customs agents abandoned the borders which became a free-for-all. No one was watching who was coming or going. Police departments that kept the peace under Saddam now were just empty buildings which people looted in short order. The military was dismissed since they were all beholden to Saddam and the result was anarchy. On their way out, they looted every armory in the country so that an insurgency was destined to be well-armed. The United States did not have enough troops on the ground to fight a war and police a country, too.
If al qaeda wasn’t in Iraq before, they certainly arrived fairly quickly. Iraq became the beacon for every badass who wanted to take a shot at the United States and earn their stripes in doing so. With American power concentrated on helping the majority Shia population who had been shut out of power in Saddam’s Iraq, the now powerless Sunni took up arms. It wasn’t until AQ overstepped their focus and began working against what the Sunni wanted (which was a share of power, not the destruction of Iraq itself) that the tide turned. The Sunni Awakening was the result and it turned the tide of the war that had been spiraling out of control up to that point.
What is particularly revealing is how all of the architects of this fiasco now deny they had a hand in it or try to paper over their roles in what they did to this country in the name of “national security.” Everybody from George Bush on down to mouthpieces like Tony Fratto and Ari Fleischer are now denying their complicity in the wasted and stolen billions, the shoddy treatment of troops returning from the war, the torture done in our name that gained us nothing in practical terms, and the lost respect from our allies around the world to say nothing of the millions of lives that have been changed forever because of this NeoCon bullshit policy of preemption as practiced in Iraq.
I just have one simple question that no one seems to be able to answer on this the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War: where the fuck is Osama bin Laden?
In watching the Obama Administration take shape over the past twelve days, I am reminded how the Bush administration took shape and steered this country off the higgest peaks of the world stage and down the Highway to Hell with maniacally laughing NeoCons at the wheel the whole way. I’m getting so used to breathing the fresh clean air of common sense and doing-the-right-thing I’ve almost forgotten what kind of a stench we just came out of. Almost but not quite. Thank God for bookmarked items in my What An Asshole file.
As a part of his late lamented lame-ass Legacy Tour George Bush admitted that Saddam Hussein was not part of the AQ plot against the World Trade Center that killed 3000 Americans but that he was still a threat to America and, therefore, it was incumbent upon us to do away with him no matter the cost. (That cost, by the way, will be borne by Americans for a long time after the name George Walker Bush is consigned to the dumpster of history.) Bush tried to pass it off as an inevitable conclusion of the faulty intelligence he manipulated but it was not. They silenced the voices of opposition in the intelligence community which merely made it seem like it was inevitable. It was not.
The war goes on in Iraq but the end is in sight thanks to the promise by candidate Obama to end the war in sixteen months from Inauguration Day. We’ve lost more troops to the war than we lost in the WTC attacks and the perpetrator of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, still roams free. The war in Afghanistan is still a forgotten war and will be until President Obama ramps it up to clean out that uncivilized area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and hopefully flush the vermin out so we can stomp them out of existence. That will be a much harder task than Iraq ever was. No big surprise that the Chimpster deferred tackling the hard project in favor of a make-work job: it’s the story of his life.
It was not a surprise that the Bushbots used the threat of nuclear war, Weapons of Mass Destruction, terrorist armies and God knows what else to scare most Americans into supporting this ill-fated and unneccessary war. It’s all they had. They claim that Saddam had all these weapons when common sense told everyone that he did not. Wimpy Bush 41 took them all out in the first Gulf War which followed close on the heels of the ten year Iran-Iraq war that decimated the cream of the next generation of Iranians and Iraqis. Saddam was at a distinct disadvantage and made up for that disadvantage with tough talk and boastful claims to keep the Iranians at bay. The Iranians bought into the claims. So, too, did the NeoCons who were looking for a war to fight to prove their manhood especially since most of them dodged and ducked the opportunity to fight when it was first presented to them in their youth.
What better way to prove how bad ass you are than to send someone else’s sons and daughters to fight in a war you wouldn’t fight in even if you could? What better way to start a war than to lie about the root causes? What better way to gloss over the destruction your short-sighted policies have caused at home and abroad than to admit you had nothing to go on but that you would do it all over again the exact same way again if you could knowing what a mess you made of it the first time? What better way to confess (without saying the actual words) that the only real reason you had for starting the War With Iraq was that Saddam threatened to kill your father? What better way indeed?
Inspirational link: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/05/bush-iraq-911/
Black & White and Cardinal Red All Over 