Sickness

Al Gore has taken to saying that the earth has a fever, that global warming is a sign of sickness.
President Bush is joined by his entire administration and both parties in Congress when he says the United States doesn't torture, that we are too good to be involved in torture.
I am an American and I know that my country has adopted torture as an accepted practice.
We do torture. We are no longer "better than that."
But torture is also a sign of sickness. Those who do torture are sick with fear. When the KKK ran loose in the American South, torture was their mode of operation. Fear was their reason. Whites in societies dependent on African workers have long used torture to prevent black uprisings.
Now we Americans live in a "white" world of fear of a Muslim uprising. We use our sickness, that fear, to justify torture.
We are better than that? Certainly not under the current leadership in America. America is sick. When will we begin to admit it, face the truth, and seek healing?

Intended Delusion

2002 - Bush declares that Iran is one of the countries in the "axis of evil"
2003 - The US invades Iraq and discovers that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program and no WMDs
2003 - Iran suspends its nuclear weapons program, long before there is any hope for success.
August 2, 2005 - In an article that could have been written this week, The Washington Post reports on the 2005 NIE which, according to the article, offers no proof of a nuclear weapons program in Iran
August 6, 2005 - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes the office of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2006 to 2007 - The US intelligence community discovers that Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 and includes that fact in the 2007 NIE
December 4, 2007 - Bush, speaking about Iran and the 2007 NIA makes this statement at his December 4 news conference:
***
But their leadership is going to have to understand that defiance and hiding programs and defying IAEA is — is not the way forward.
And my hope is, is that, you know, the Iranian regime takes a look at their policies and changes their policies back to where we were prior to the election of Ahmadinejad, which was a hopeful period.
They had suspended their program. They were at the table. The United States has made some very positive gestures to convince them that there was a better way forward. And hopefully we can get back to that day.
***
So yesterday December 4, President Bush told the American people that prior to August 2005 when Ahmadinejad took his office as President of Iran, just after the 2005 NIE's release, diplomacy with Iran was looking up because Iran "had suspended their program." The US obviously knew that fact.
But now, December 2007, we are expected to believe that the 2005 NIE convinced us that Iran's nuclear weapons program was continuing and to understand that on that basis, Bush and Cheney have been accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons.
In a criminal investigation it is important to analyze who did what when, who said what and when did they know. But why do we have to think in terms of criminal investigations in order to understand President Bush's foreign policy? Why does America have to be so shifty when dealing with the world? Why does Bush have to be so shifty when dealing with the American public?
OK, a dose of reality here:
* According to the August 2005 Washington Post article referenced above, the 2005 NIE offered no proof that Iran had ever had a nuclear weapons program
* The 2007 NIE, whose revelations the White House attempted to suppress, finally revealed that prior to 2003, Iran ACTUALLY HAD a nuclear weapons program
* There's no reason to believe that the White House didn't know about any of this in a timely manner
I'm left to conclude that there's an irony to all of this. What the 2007 NIE actually revealed was that there ever was a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Prior to this new NIE, there was no such evidence. Yet prior to the release of the 2007 NIE, Bush and Cheney were making every attempt to convince the American people and the world that Iran's nuclear power research was in reality a nuclear weapons program. Prior to 2007, Bush and Cheney had no evidence to support their claims. Yet they did not want the American people to know what the 2007 NIE revealed. Why? Why did Bush and Cheney not want the American people and the world to know that Iran had ever in fact had a nuclear weapons program?
The answer is clear to me, but I'll leave my readers to come to their own conclusions.

Still Early

Most of us who are below and to the left on the political compass of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, The Weekly Standard, and Dick Cheney have realized that the credibility of the White House isn't what it is made out to be by the mainstream media in this country. It has been a puzzle for me why the American people haven't insisted that Congress impeach Bush and Cheney for all the lies they have told us over the years.
For any other president, getting caught telling this many lies would have been an embarrassment. President Reagan's administration broke new ground in terms of legitimizing lies, though, with the Iran/Contra scandal, an American disgrace that Reagan and company turned into hero worship for the Right. Remember Oliver North? Since Bush took office in 2001, this Reagan-era form of lying has virtually defined America. Does anyone still remember Iraq's "weapons of mass murder" claims by Bush as we invaded? Do we still believe Bush didn't know the truth about those?
Yesterday's headlines unveiled what should become the worst scandal of American history. Yet I expect that the mainstream media will do everything in its power to whitewash and legitimize the White House lies about Iran. Kevin Drum in his Washington Monthly Political Animal blog points out something that wasn't in yesterday's media. He points to a November 8 Gareth Porter article suggesting that the release of this new National Intelligence Estimate which contradicts all the White House fear mongering over the past year and more concerning Iran's nukes has been delayed by a year by Vice President Cheney. It would appear that Cheney wanted the intelligence cooked in a way which the intelligence community wasn't prepared to serve to America.
But media and White House efforts are already underway to spin this report in such a way as to suggest that Bush and Cheney have been on the right path all along. It's still too early to tell if Congress will hold anybody in the Bush/Cheney administration responsible for all the lies. But how on earth will the American people convince themselves that Bush and Cheney didn't know about this intelligence when they told us all those lies about Iran?