Bitter Vitters, Fred Thompson "Mole" For Nixon, And Fibby Libby

Even George Orwell could not have imagined, much less felt it would make believable fiction, some of most recent headlines out of the Bush White House, their "moralist" (which always means, "you better live by my moral standards if you want to stay out of trouble, but hey, if I falter, I'll just claim God's forgiveness and keep on keeping on") far right, and their subversion of democracy.

Let's look at a handful, shall we?

*As The Times reported several days ago, Donald Rumsfeld as then Defense Secretary called off a strike against a supposed major meeting of Al Qaeda officials, including the purported #2 man to Osama bin Laden, the former pediatrician al Zawari; because it was just too dangerous for the Navy Seals and CIA operatives who would have attacked; uh... so it's better to keep tens of thousands of far less trained 18 year olds out fighting where the biggest terrorist is often a (perhaps all too justifiably pissed off) civilian?

* Turns out Fred Thompson, the bad actor and even worse politician, may have been a "mole" for Richard Nixon (the original Tricky Dick, although he was never as good at it as Dick Cheney has proven to be), carrying confidential information from the 1970s Watergate Commission to Dick Nixon's White House to help a lying leader avoid pitfalls; really makes you want to entrust Fred with the White House, eh?

* While the tighty righties scream that Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich (who, I believe, gave a considerable amount of money to Republicans beyond the contributions of his ex-wife noted to Democrats) was MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more evil than George Bush's miraculous and quite probably illegal commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence in the PlameGate affair, none of them ever bothered to mention that Libby happened to have been Rich's lawyer and one of those lobbying Clinton for clemency; Libby has certainly been the benefactor of so many riches

* Senator David Vitters (R-Louse... er... Louisiana) who railed against Bill Clinton's immorality while screaming that marriage is too precious to waste on gays who just happens to have been a client of not just the infamous "DC Madam" but also other prostitutes during - and this is just toooooo precious - the same time period he was shaking his moralist finger at Clinton

His and Hersh: How Bush And Rumsfeld Created The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Then Protected Themselves

I posted this at All Things Democrat in the wee hours of this morning, but it needs as much attention as possible (remember how Rummy dismissed abuses in Iraq prisons as the work of "a few bad apples" - I can agree with this if you say those bad apples are named Georgie Porgy and Donny Dumbsfeld):

While perhaps too many Americans have been closely following interviews with England’s two princes (Harry and William) and the unanswered questions of what happened on the night of their mother’s - Princess Diana’s - death a decade ago, there’s a much bigger issue that needs attention: what Bush and Rumsfeld allowed happen at the Iraq prison Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere).

Hardhitting journalist Seymour Hersh, one of the first to break the stories of abuse of prisoners - many of whom were arrested only for being Iraqis or Muslim or simply looking different from Americans - by American soldiers in 2004, is back in The New Yorker with fresh details that tell us both President Bush and then Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld LIED LIED LIED about not knowing of the torture and degradation and unnecessary deaths while they worked tirelessly to keep any official investigation into it from looking beyond grunt soldiers and low ranking generals.

Much of the punch packed in Hersh’s latest piece comes from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, the man charged with investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib when the Bush Administration and Pentagon could no longer look blankly and say, “What’s Abu Ghraib?” Taguba says that Bush and Rummy knew WAY before they say they did about the claims of massive abuses, tortures and even deaths at the prison, that they specifically BLOCKED Taguba from looking any higher up the food chain than lowly GIs and minor generals, and THEN forced Taguba to retire as punishment for trying to investigate as fully and fairly as a decent inquiry should.

The highest “hit” there, of course, was Janis Karpinski, a one star general then titularly in charge of Abu Ghraib but - she says - forced by the Pentagon to allow psy ops and torture proponents run the prison and then busted down when she did as ordered by Rummy; the rest were the likes of Lindy England (the Abu Ghraib poster girl for torture and leash holding as well as frequent model for sex pictures in and around prisoners).

Poor Pundit, Rich Pundit - I'll Take Rich Over Brooks Anyday

While David Brooks tries to analyze Al Gore and, as usual, despite his bleak attempts at painting a "Vulcan Utopia" comes off far more like a Stiffly Stifferson than any media spin about Gore, Frank Rich has far richer things to say in "Operation Freedom From Iraqis!":

When all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”

It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.

But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.

Read the rest of Rich.

On Eve of Wolfowitz's "Resignation", Bush Says, "Done A Heluva Job, Wolfie!"

NBC News just reported that the resignation deal is complete (which many assume will, as he demanded, will made no admission of wrongdoing) re: Paul Wolfowitz, currently the head of the World Bank, formerly Rumsfeld's assistant at the Pentagon who insisted the Iraq war "would pay for itself."

At the same damned time, President Bush is falling all over himself with praise for "stud" Wolfowitz, whose latest "excuse" for his wrongful deeds at the World Bank is that he was too afraid of his live-in girlfriend whom he gave an unbelievably lucrative salary (with no experience to match it).

Wolfie also had no expertise with money or development or people or.... well, let's just say, President Bush ADORES incompetence and demands all those who work for him (mind you, he thinks he OWNS them although we pay the salary!).

Perverted Justice: Bush Promises Veto of Troop/Combat Widow Pay Raise

Is this sick, or what?

This story would sound like big drama if describing a rapid-fire sere tennis championship or hysterically funny if it were a Firesign Theater bit. But this situation is anything but light-hearted when it involves men and women forced to sacrifice their lives everyday for yet another lied-us-into war.

The way the Bush Administration and top GOP lawmakers and candidates rush for any chance of a photo op with troops (especially when it doesn't put them in the same dangerous situations our soldiers endure) while they hand billions to defense contractors seems pretty sick. But pair it with the grave reality that the Bushies and GOPees simultaneously race to cut services (pay, medical, support) for American service men and women is well past perverted.

Yet right now, President Bush is threatening to veto a bill to provide a troop and combat widow salary increase that passed by an extremely high majority in the House of Representatives. Mind you, it's not even a significant payroll raise being discussed here. But any amount is too much for Bush who would prefer to give the money to Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, and other Republican f(r)iends.

The only irony here is that just in what Donald Rumsfeld - who left the Pentagon as Secretary of the Defense Department but now gets a HUGE paycheck while still there as a "consultant" - makes a year for his services, we could pay for a LOT of soldiers AND proper protection for them.

Confession Is Good For The (Bush) Hole?

Another absolutely right-on Jeff Danziger cartoon, this one (from March 16th) on the strange "confessions" by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who admitted to being a 9/11 mastermind, the Madrid train bombings, stealing candy from a baby, and making Michael Jackson become a sexual pervert (just to name an unlikely few). Mohammed, as you may recall, is one of our "poster children" for torture, with Rumsfeld and Cheney coming out saying that "waterboarding" is good (as opposed to the experts, who agree that torture-based admissions aren't worth the paper they're written on).

While New DOD Chief Wanted to Close It Down, White House Reports Bush Will Likely Never Close Gitmo

This may be just about the ONLY information about Donald Rumsfeld's replacement as Department of Defense secretary, Robert Gates: that in his first few weeks in his new job, he sought to close down the American gulag known as Guantanamo Bay (a/k/a Gitmo) in Cuba.

Yet, as always (the only thing besides completely shredding the English language as he speaks and a complete and utter lack of understanding about history and everything else - odd for an history major at Yale), Bush is making it clear that he will NEVER allow the detention facility to be shut down.

Mind you, we've had more than 2,000 detainees go through there and subjected to truly abusive, torturous, and mind-bending/breaking psy-ops and interrogation techniques yet we have only lodged charges against about 10.

Ten out of more than 2,000. What the hell does that say about the Bushies, especially given their great comfort level with trumping up charges through lies, cooked intelligence, and a steady diet of torture (with the "dressed up" name of "extraordinary rendition")? Certainly, the Pentagon and all these defense contractors have acted as Bush's co-dependent enablers.

On This Anniversary Of Our Invasion of Iraq

"The Daily Show" reminds us of Donald Rumsfeld, then the Defense Secretary, and his comments on February 7, 2003, about five weeks before we invaded:

"This war could last six days, maybe six weeks,

but I certainly doubt it can last six months."

Sheik Mohammed And The Beheading of Journalist Daniel Pearl: How Do You Trust The Confessions Of The Tortured

Today, the Bushies purposely let slip that Sheikh Mohammed, whom we've had in custody for more than a few years and whom we apparently torture on a near daily basis (Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld both noted he was an excellent candidate for "waterboarding" torture to find the truth, has claimed he was responsible for the kidnapping and videotaped execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl. They also claim he's admitted to being one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Reports AP:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's capture four years ago didn't shut down al-Qaida or bring the Americans to Osama bin Laden. But if his mega-confession is to be believed, his arrest was a crushing blow to bin Laden's plans for even more deadly attacks in the wake of 9/11.

But after more than four years in custody, and exposed to torture-torture-torture, how can we be sure what he really did or didn't do? That's one of the huge problems with torture; the information you get is notoriously unreliable. I don't buy that these admissions are true when they were elicited so very long after his capture.

Actually, I can say that there have been at least four or five separate statements/alerts offered up by Sheikh Mohammed in the past that turned out to be completely false, including some of the silliest possible attack on America scenarios. Yet now, the Bushies insist we believe him. Right.

Frank Rich: "Why Libby's Pardon Is A Slam Dunk"

Sadly, I fully agree with Frank Rich: it is not a question of whether President Bush will grant Vice President Dick Cheney's former senior staffer, Scooter Libby, a full pardon, but WHEN. As much as experts say he really can't do this until he ends his presidency in January 2009, I would not be surprised if it happened within weeks from now. Read all of Rich at Rozius Unbound, or settle for this big snip:

Even by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

Mr. Libby’s novel was called “The Apprentice.” His memoir could be titled “The Accomplice.” Its first chapter would open in August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too fittingly, with the Congressional appearance of two Iraq veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

It was WHIG’s secret machinations more than four years ago that led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq’s supposedly imminent threat to America with “gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.” In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in “Hubris,” it was WHIG (equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that Saddam’s “smoking gun” could be “a mushroom cloud.”

Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies. (It also tried to hide the financial cost of the war by keeping it out of the regular defense budget, but that’s another, if related, story.) The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range. Now we can fully appreciate that bizarre incident on C-Span in October 2003, when an anguished Cher, of all unlikely callers, phoned in to ask why administration officials, from the president down, were not being photographed with patients like those she had visited at Walter Reed. “I don’t understand why these guys are so hidden,” she said.

The answer is simple: Out of sight, out of mind was the game plan, and it has been enforced down to the tiniest instances. When HBO produced an acclaimed (and apolitical) documentary last year about military medics’ remarkable efforts to save lives in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” Army brass at the last minute boycotted planned promotional screenings in Washington and at Fort Campbell, Ky. In a memo, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley warned that the film, though made with Army cooperation, could endanger veterans’ health by provoking symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The General Kiley who was so busy policing an HBO movie for its potential health hazards is the same one who did not correct the horrific real-life conditions on his watch at Walter Reed. After the Post exposé was published, he tried to spin it by boasting that most of the medical center’s rooms “were actually perfectly O.K.” and scapegoating “soldiers leaving food in their rooms” for the mice and cockroach infestations. That this guy is still surgeon general of the Army — or was as of Friday — makes you wonder what he, like Mr. Libby, has on his superiors.

The rest is here.

Bob Herbert: "Lift The Curtain"

Thanks to JP at Welcome to Pottersville, we get to read this important op/ed by Bob Herbert of The New York Times related to the hardly-new revelation that the Bush Administration treats our troops like crap:

Neglect, incompetence, indifference, lies.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president’s office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration’s moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush’s catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for “hillbilly armor” — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

Fellow soldiers cheered when the question was raised, and others asked why they were being sent into combat with antiquated equipment. The defense secretary was not amused. “You go to war with the Army you have,” he callously replied, “not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Have we forgotten that while most Americans have sacrificed zilch for this war, the mostly uncomplaining soldiers and marines are being sent into the combat zones for two, three and four tours? Multiple combat tours are an unconscionable form of Russian roulette that heightens the chances of a warrior being killed or maimed.

[...]The administration has tried its best to keep the reality of the war away from the public at large, to keep as much of the carnage as possible behind the scenes. No pictures of the coffins coming home. Limited media access to Walter Reed.

That protective curtain needs to be stripped away, exposing the enormity of this catastrophe for all to see ...

Read the rest here at JP's place.

Paul Krugman: "Valor and Squalor"

In his Times column today, Dr. Krugman turns his ink-loaded scalpel toward the Bush-worsened debacle surrounding care for our wounded troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals. Read it all here or be satisfied with my thick sniplet:

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

Rozius has the rest.

Did I Happen to Mention...?

I'm not sure I posted this except perhaps parenthetically but it's worthy of note (and a few sad tears, as well):

Bush was in such a big frickin' rush to surge to get more troops into Iraq before anyone on Capitol Hill could even begin shaping their lips around the word, "No!" with regard to Bush's "Iraq escalation" that many of the 21,700 or so men and women of our armed services that he shipped them out BEFORE they could begin special training courses on anti-insurgency techniques.

::grrrrrrrroowllllll::

I'm beginning to think that American citizens like you and me need to become insurgents. No, we won't blow up vehicles or people, but we should oust the Bush crew. I'm sure we can find room for George, Dick, Condi, Bob Gates and Rummy, Tony Snow(job), etc. at Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo. And, of course, they shouldn't have access to lawyers or mental health professionals or proper food, or get to face their accusers. What's good for brown people should be plenty good enough for the brown nosers and the boobs.

Also according to Bush's own words, it's fine and dandy if we make them sit there the rest of their (un)natural lives without ever filing a single charge against them since the Constitution allows it, they insist - the Bushies seem to operate off a diferent version of it compared with the rest of us -and it's just good homeland security to "disappear" them without their families knowing where they have gone.

True, Americans DO Underestimate Iraqi Deaths; But Here's WHY

MSNBC is reporting that Americans, by and large, underestimate the number of deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq by the tens of thousands. But let me tell you exactly WHY they do.

The Bush Administration went into Iraq making it very clear they would NOT be counting civilian deaths. First, then Defense Secretary insisted that there simply wouldn't be that many and then he said it simply wasn't a priority in a situation that grew very quickly out of control (although I'd certainly argue that the instant they realized they could not control it they should have done something ELSE). Only then, very grudgingly, did the DoD release Iraqi civilian death numbers which seemed remarkably small even back when Iraq wasn't quite the miasma of horror it started to be a year after we rolled in back in March 2003.

ONLY when independent organizations began coming up with very high death counts (and please bear in mind that those 1,000-3,000 civilian deaths you often hear on the news are JUST those bodies found and sent to ONE central morgue in beautiful downtown Baghdad) which I bet are STILL low for reality did the Bush Administration ever release any civilian numbers at all.

So there is a reason for Americans misjudging how many Iraqi civilians are dead: their own government lies to them on a minute-by-minute basis.

However, I would argue that by now, even the most fervent rightie should realize that the Bush Administration would choke to death on the slightest true statement. Thus, smart Americans and not so smart ones should distrust everything they say and with it, assume that innocent Iraqis are dying in droves.

I suspect that, should we even get out of Iraq a year from now (and we won't, apparently), we will learn at some point that as many as 2-3 MILLION Iraqis have died or been seriously, permanently injured. That's 10% of the country's population. Another 2-5 MILLION have fled the country. That's another 10-20% of the population under Saddam. For all the talk of insurgents, MANY civilians have been killed in U.S. action, either under Rumsfeld's orders or through actions of contractors.

I base this on information I've been tracking almost weekly from worldwide news sources (from 6,000 dead in Fallujah one day, etc.) since August 2003.

"The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib": We Must Watch To Know What Was Done In Our Names

Here's the review by Tom Shales of the HBO-broadcast documentary of the prison abuses and completely inhuman treatment the Pentagon conducted at Abu Ghraib, "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib".

But there's more than a good review that should make you try to see it.

What was done at Abu Ghraib - as at Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo and countless "secret" prison locations and others under the Bushies - has been perpetrated in our names and with our tax dollars financing this. We must know. We must do all we can to be sure it will not happen so easily again.

We also must understand and prevent another case where only the lowliest of soldiers serving be pointed at by Bush and a Rumsfeld and the Pentagon as "a few bad apples" when it's damned well apparent the orders came from the very top. That's Bush, that's Cheney, and that's Rumsfeld. We can be shocked and sickened by a Lindy England, for example, but Lindy was there under orders ostensibly from us.

And anyone who thinks that their conduct will STOP terrorism - well, better see a doctor, because you're in serious fantasyland.

My only wish was that this was not being broadcast solely on one of the most premium of cable networks. Everyone should see this.