Bush Never Has And Never Will

Key congressional lawmakers thought they have made waterboarding forbidden. Waterboarding, a form of interrogation used by the CIA to extract information from suspected terrorist, is considered to be torture by most, including many former military leaders and politicians. While McCain, Warner and Graham held out against the presidents plan to make torture legal under his interpretation of the Geneva convention, they later sold out our military and American moral standards by allowing the president to interpret Article 3 of the Geneva convention. The one thing that they all had done though, was to ban waterboarding.

Apparently the president doesn't think so. He has not ruled out the use of waterboarding and says, "it would be wrong to tell terrorists which practices they might face."

How can so many people assigned the task of running this country be so freaking stupid. The goal was not to tell the terrorist what practices we will and will not use!

It is to tell the rest of the world who we are asking to back us in our fight against terrorism what practices we will and will not use!

The world views us as having lost our moral compass. We used to be the guy everyone looked up to. Now we are the guy everyone looks down upon.

The president had an opportunity to tell the world, "We are better than the terrorist. We hold firm to the belief that torture is wrong. We hold firm to the commitment to uphold international law."

At this point, Bush keeps trying to frame the conflict as one between good and evil. The rest of the world is sitting around, scratching their heads saying, "Ok, on this side, we have a bunch of guys who fly planes into buildings and kill innocent people... On the other side you have a bunch of guys who attach electrodes to people's genitalia, operate KGB style prisons, and invade countries that had nothing to do with the people who flew airplanes into buildings... Who are the good guys supposed to be? This looks like a battle between evil and evil."

What the president thought he said was, "we want the terrorist to be uncertain of what techniques we will use to extract questionable information."

Instead, the rest of world hears is, "Well, is being the moral superior really all that important? Rummy Dick and I don't think so. Now excuse me while I take a short trip down to Gitmo to kick around some towel heads while they are chained to a fence."


Waterboarding Historically Controversial
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006; Page A17

Key senators say Congress has outlawed one of the most notorious detainee interrogation techniques -- "waterboarding," in which a prisoner feels near drowning. But the White House will not go that far, saying it would be wrong to tell terrorists which practices they might face.

Inside the CIA, waterboarding is cited as the technique that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the prime plotter of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to begin to talk and provide information -- though "not all of it reliable," a former senior intelligence official said.

Waterboarding is variously characterized as a powerful tool and a symbol of excess in the nation's fight against terrorists. But just what is waterboarding, and where does it fit in the arsenal of coercive interrogation techniques?

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk."

The article said the practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."

The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

(Full Story)

Bush Comes Up Short Defending His Policies On Terror

Bush spoke about the NIE report that says that Bush's invasion of Iraq has made us less safe in the United States. He tried to turn the tables by saying that the leak was politically motivated. Even if it was, the substance of the report is the same. Bush's policies are wrong. Dead wrong.

And they use it as a recruitment tool because they understand the stakes. They understand what will happen to them when we defeat them in Iraq.

You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience.

We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.

Yes, we were not in Iraq then... and neither was Al Qaida. They were in Afghanistan. A nation that we have put 1/7th the effort into as Iraq. Why is it that the terrorist were 1/7th as important to Bush as Saddam?

Now, you know what's interesting about the NIE? It was an intelligence report done last April. As I understand, the conclusions — the evidence on the conclusions reached was stopped being gathered on February — at the end of February.

And here we are coming down the stretch in an election campaign and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting? Somebody's taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes.

Hmmmm.... I am trying to remember if anyone has leaked an NIE report for political purposes before... Oh, yes... THE WHITE HOUSE! Live by the leak, die by the leak. And where is the proof that it was released for political purposes? And even if it was, is not keeping the damaging report secret not political also? If you can release the key findings now, you could have released the key findings 6 months ago also.

But once again there's a leak out of our government, coming right down the stretch in this campaign in order to create confusion in the minds of the American people.

I wonder if that is anything like raising the terror threat constantly just before the 2004 election and then having the vice president coming out and saying if you vote for Kerry, you will die?

And so we're going to — I told the DNI to declassify this document. You can read it for yourself. It will stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq; you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy.

Again, is using selective and distorting reports about the WMDs in Iraq "somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of the enemy?"

And so John Negroponte, the DNI, is going to declassify the document as quickly as possible — declassify the key judgments for you to read yourself.

So, basically, it is a declassification of the NIE report for political purposes... and not even the entire thing. Only the sections that Bush agrees with.

Bush exploits 9/11 at every chance he gets. You can play a drinking game with the number of times he says 9/11. But the fact remains. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The people that did have something to do with 9/11, Bush has ignored before and after the fact. His grand experiment is failing to keep us safer. I still believe that we need to stay in Iraq to finish the job. But the key was to have never gone in to Iraq in the first place. The immanent threat was not Saddam, but Bin Laden. Now the Bush administration has no clue as to his wereabouts.

Sobering Conclusions On Why Jihad Has Spread

In addition to the "politics" Bush claims is surrounding the leak of the NIE, comes the claims that Bush is hiding an even more damning report. The report is being held as a draft until after the elections.

Amid furor over Iraq report, calls to release another
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As political debate churned over an intelligence report released Tuesday, a top Democrat called for the release of a second, new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that she says "paints a grim picture."

The White House denied a charge by Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, that another intelligence report is being kept in draft form so that its contents won't be public until the midterm elections in November are over.

"I hear it paints a grim picture. And because it does, I am told it is being held until after the November elections. If this estimate is finished, it should not be stamped 'draft' and hidden from the American people until after the elections," Harman said in a statement.

(Full Story)

Flawed Logic

Today, President Bush claimed that those of us who believe that torture is immoral and that Bush's policies in the war on terror have strayed from the foundations of what makes this country great and respected around the world, have "flawed logic."

Let me tell you what is flawed logic - anything and everything that is coming from the White House.

We cannot and will not win the war on terror following the lead of George Bush. The war on terror is not for the conquest of land. It is not over the rights of waterways or over natural resources.

The war on terror is over the mind. We are fighting a war of ideology and to win a war of ideology, we must have the decisively better ideological model.

This is not a theoretical scenario, but an actuality. No nation has ever 'won' a ideological war based on the suppression of an opposition group. It can only win the ideological war when the ideas that one nation possesses are seen as superior and embraced by the opposition. And we can be seen as being better if we are not better.

In Viet Nam, we only started to win once we change the ideological campaign, but by then, the political will was gone at home.

The Soviet Union had legions of secret police that would suppress and oppress, abduct and torture, but it also lost the war because we were seen as ideologically superior.

If we do not differentiate ourselves from the terrorist as being morally and ideologically superior to them, we will lose this war because we can never win it in that fashion. Bush lacks moral clerity of his own to understand the importance of this need.

Would it me easier to catch terrorist by torturing prisoners? Yes, without question. But all we do is create hate and resentment through out the region and the world. Everyone is afraid of the bully and will do what he says because they are afraid of him. But everyone is secretly hating him and wishing for someone to come along and knock him out.

Bush wants to be the bully. I want us to be the guy who protects the other kids from the bully. Not only is he only going to make us less saf at home, he risks the troops on the ground.

The only ideological flaw going on here is Bush's brain... or lack thereof.

Bush fights GOP revolt over terror bill
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
19 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - President Bush fought back Friday against a Republican revolt in the Senate over tough anti-terror legislation and rejected warnings that the United States had lost the high moral ground to adversaries. "It's flawed logic," he snapped.

Bush urged lawmakers to quickly approve legislation authorizing military tribunals and harsh interrogations of terror suspects in order to shield U.S. personnel from being prosecuted for war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, which set international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war.

Tough interrogations have been instrumental in preventing attacks against the United States, Bush said. "Time's running out" for the legislation, he warned, with Congress set to adjourn in a few weeks.

The president called a Rose Garden news conference to confront a Republican rebellion led by Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.

To the administration's dismay, Colin Powell, Bush's former secretary of state, has joined with the lawmakers. Powell said Bush's plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would cause the world "to doubt the moral basis" of the fight against terror and "put our own troops at risk."

(Full Story)

Also see - Senators Defy Bush On Terror Measure

Update: Bush Detainee Plan Adds to World Doubts Of U.S., Powell Says
By Karen DeYoung and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 19, 2006; Page A04

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he decided to publicly oppose the Bush administration's proposed rules for the treatment of terrorism suspects in part because the plan would add to growing doubts about whether the United States adheres to its own moral code.

"If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions," Powell said in an interview, "whether we believe it or not, people are now starting to question whether we're following our own high standards."

(Full Story)

Update: TGL has a good skit on Bush Vs. Powell