The Recruiting Sergeant
‘THE presidency of George W Bush is fast turning into a nightmare from which the American people resolutely refuse to wake up.
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| ‘If you want to go to the toilet, you’ll have to crap on Iraq like me’ |
Whatever happens in November, the legacy of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the whole Iraq war will last for a generation.
And its likely to take almost as long to turn around an economy that is projected to be a staggering $2,000bn in the red between now and 2009.
That more than half of America continues to support a President who will surely rank as one of the worst in history is something that non-Americans struggle to fathom.
The only two groups to have benefited from the four years in which Bush has been in the White House are the super-rich and al Qaeda.
And this morning there is yet more evidence of Bushs value as a recruiting sergeant for Islamist extremists.
According to a Guardian investigation, reports of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently chose to ignore them.
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh also details how Bush himself signed off on the establishment of a secret unit given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate high-value suspects in defiance of international law.
The Guardian says Hershs book Chain Of Command leaves senior figures in the administration far more implicated in the torture scandals in Cuba and Baghdad than previously apparent.
One CIA analyst returned from Guantanamo in summer 2002 convinced that we were committing war crimes and that more than half the people there didnt belong there.
Prisoners were forced to lie in the own faeces, they were stripped, had cold water poured over them and made to stand until they got hypothermia and were physically abused by guards.
But what Guantanamo started the disastrous war in Iraq threatens to finish namely, to create a complete schism between the West and the Arab world.
The Telegraph this morning reports on how a TV journalist working for Al-Arabiya (one of the main Arab satellite channels) was shot and killed by US forces as he reported on the growing unrest in Baghdad.
Mazen al-Tumeizi was describing an incident in which a crowd of Iraqis were dancing in celebration around a Bradley fighting vehicle damaged by a car bomb two helicopter gunships were seen flying down the street and opening fire.
Tumeizi was hit by a bullet and doubled over, shouting, Im dying, Im dying as he collapsed.
One more victim of a war seemingly with no end.’
Posted: 13th, September 2004 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
