Mistakes, Maneuvers, or Intentions

Áine on February 21st, 2006 filed in Politics, Essays

Who’s Counting Bush’s Mistakes? By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real (February 19, 2006)

I’ll add to that…

9/11: Presidential Daily Briefing warns of impending attack; Bush sits and reads “My Pet Goat” in a school room in Florida as attacks are happening; unprepared, and unable to act. 2976 killed on Bush’s watch. 19 hijackers, 15 are Saudis (none are Iraqi or Afghani), 7 are still alive and well in their own countries. I know, that makes no sense, but that’s the truth. The Taliban denounced the attack and claimed that it was not connected to Osama bin Laden, the Muslim leader living in Afghanistan whom the U.S. government declared the prime suspect. Virtually all world leaders, including traditional rivals or enemies of the United States, denounced the attacks and expressed sympathy for the American people. In addition to the Taliban, this included Libyan president Moammar Qadhafi, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, and Cuban president Fidel Castro. An exception was Saddam Hussein, then ruler of Iraq, who called the attacks the fruits of U.S. crimes against humanity. We still don’t know -with certainty- Who is responsible for the attack, but even Bush admitted it wasn’t Saddam Hussein.

Bin Laden: Bin Laden initially denied responsibility for 9/11; in two 2001 statements he says : “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation… I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States… I had no knowledge of these attacks…”. Bin Laden calls his own group “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders” and, without the Islamic credentials to do so, issued a fatwa against Americans in 1998. While common usage of the name “al-Qaeda” dates from much earlier, 2001 saw the first formal use of the name for the grouping of Jihadists when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence using anti-Mafia (RICO) laws that required the existence of a named criminal organization. In later tapes, purportedly with bin Laden in them, he allegedly has admitted ties to al-Qaeda and involvement in the early planning stages of the attack. We don’t, however, know if the tapes are authentic (could be our own blackops), or whether bin Laden is simply using the publicity surrounding the al-Qaeda name to sustain his own leadership claims. Bin Laden is still at-large.

Bin Laden also had links to BCCI bank per Senator John Kerry at a Senate Finance Commitee (SFC) hearing on September 26, 2001. Oddly enough, the archive of the September 2001 hearings of the Senate Finance Committee is mysteriously missing from the SFC archives. Fortunately, CNN-Europe still has in it’s archives the story to corroborate Kerry’s assertion. Also note the BCCI connection to Kissinger Associates, Brent Scowcroft, State of Florida, et.al.

Also see: BBC’s The Power of Nightmares (free at GoogleVideo).

Anthrax Attacks (Sept-Oct 2001): 22 people infected, 5 killed. Authorities speculate it originated within the U.S. and that the Anthrax spores may have come from a USArmy lab; Some suggest ties to the Israeli intelligence service; Investigation is currently at a standstill - Cold case; Perpetrator(s) unknown and still at-large.

Afghanistan (Oct 2001 to present): Attack on Afghanistan, whose government harboured bin Laden’s organization, as a response to 9/11; 276 US killed, 685 US wounded, 65 coalition forces killed, ~1000-50000 (uncounted) Afghani killed. Detainees held in Afghanistan by US troops have been tortured and humiliated in the same way as those in Iraq, and elsewhere.

“The occupation of Afghanistan served only to turn the Taliban from opponents to supporters of the opium trade. Opium constitutes over a third of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product and virtually all its recordable exports. [. . .] Everyone is involved in the business, from warlords to the resurgent Taliban to members of Hamid Karzai’s government. Since the US and Britain seized the country in 2001, 87% of world trade in opium is ascribed to Afghanistan, mostly consumed by western economies. [. . .] When the Taliban were in charge things were different. The regime stopped virtually all poppy cultivation in 2001, a fact verified by UN monitors. [. . .] Afghanistan’s economy is now wholly reliant on opium as a result of the west’s ending of Taliban crop suppression and refusal to curb consumption. The policy was deliberate.” [Source]

Iraq: No ties to bin Laden or al-Qaeda, in fact, the organizations doing terrorism around the world were enemies of Saddam Hussein (he was a secular leader, not a theocrat). The Bush administration “fixed” (meaning ‘rigged’) Iraq intelligence to conform with Bush policies (see: After Downing Street). U.S. has spent ~$300 billion so far pursuing this war, and that figure climbs by $6 billion each month; 2276 US killed (53 were female), 16653 US wounded, 204 coalition forces killed, estimated ~180000 Iraqi killed, ~81 journalists killed, ~310 civilian contractors killed. Abu Ghraib torture and deaths, Gitmo, other prisons (known and secret); extraordinary renditions; indefinite detentions without legal charges or due process. Depleted uranium munitions destroying the environment and the future health of residents, both animal and human. No WMD were ever found in Iraq. Archaeological treasures from the Cradle of Civilization - looted and destroyed.

The Iraqi people, who had nothing to do with 9/11, suffered under Hussein’s police state, then US / UN sanctions, and now a primarily US-led occupation. They have no jobs, food, power, and clean water is spotty at best, and there are shortages of gasoline in a country with the second largest oil field reserves in the world. Iraq now produces less oil than it did under Saddam Hussein. Is it any wonder these people are pissed off? I’ve seen poll figures that state 70-80% of all Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country, this is why they elected theocrats to their government.

In Iraq, the U.S. fights an enemy it hardly knows. Its descriptions have relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists, insurgents, al-Qaeda, and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality. The U.S. is fighting an extremist jihad as well. Private contractors, many of whom were the ones in charge of interrogation and torture, are paid many times more than what military members are paid, and are under no legal jurisdiction in their ventures overseas. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has taken to supplying the insurgency in Iraq with suicide bombers and volunteer mujahideen.

Iran: The administration not only jinxed its Afghanistan operations by attacking Iraq (and threatening to attack Syria), but also provided Iran both the rationale for and time to move toward nuclear weapons. Both China and Russia are, even now, sidling up to Iran, as are Islamic factions within Iraq and Palestine. Last August, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, allegedly a Holocaust denier, was elected Iran’s President, although his militant speeches are not much different from those of Hamas in Palestine, in that, he does not recognize Israel as a sovereign state.

Palestine: Much to the surprise of the U.S. and other western nations, Hamas, an Islamic party and a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the Palestinian election in Jan 2006. Hamas does not recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Hamas’ popularity stems in part from its welfare and social services to Palestinians in the occupied territories, including school and hospital construction. The failure to see this outcome was another example of the dangerous ignorance of Mideast politics, culture, and history by the Bush administration. Furthermore, a decision by Russia to sell arms to the Palestinian Authority may be made after negotiations with Hamas leaders in Moscow next month. Ignoring dissenting views has its consequences.

North Korea: U.S. bases in South Korea for more than 50 years; tensions on the Korean Peninsula are rising and North Korea cannot help but strengthen its military deterrent force. Russia appears to be intervening in this one as well. North Korea now poses a greater nuclear danger to South Korea, Japan, and international security than in 2002 when Bush described Pyongyang as part of an “axis of evil.” We have no guarantees that North Korea will not export nuclear material or even finished nuclear weapons.

Emergency Management: Hurricane Katrina Response = Total ClusterFuck. Funds squandered — $850 million — and counting; baffling failures (.pdf) by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and the Bush administration. Survivors still homeless 6 months later. Surviving a natural disaster, or one created by a terrorist attack, requires planning and preparedness. This administration is still unprepared for such disasters.

Fiscal Management: Clinton surplus becomes record deficit. Republicans doubled our national debt to $8.2 trillion… and we have nothing to show for it but an additional 5.4 million Americans fallen below the poverty line, and higher gas and heating oil prices threaten the very existence of the poorest of the poor, many of whom work 2 or 3 jobs to try to make ends meet.

Medicare Drug Program: $50 billion white elephant; According to a January report by the progressive think tank Center for Economic Policy Research, the program’s cost to state and federal taxpayers is estimated at $776 billion for the next eight years — and Medicare is prohibited from negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for lower drug prices. Under the old Medicaid drug program, the pharmaceutical industry typically guaranteed a 15% reduction in drug costs, which is no longer happening. Bottom line: this Bush plan is a bad deal for patients and taxpayers.

Social Programs: 45 million people with no healthcare; gutting of social programs; global gag rule - No U.S. assistance to any international family planning or health organization that ever even mentions abortion; Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line, yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two.

The Military: AWOL Bush and 5-deferment Cheney continue to send Americans into a quagmire with no exit strategy, and plans for more quagmires to follow; Stop-Loss keeps them obligated past the terms of their enlistment contracts; recalls to active service of older veterans, sometimes long past their terms of obligation.

Swiftboating presidential candidate John F. Kerry, slandering McCain, Murtha, Cleland; questioning who had ‘earned’ a medal (especially loathsome when done by those who never served); refusing to speak to a dead soldier’s mother and allowing her to sit in a Texas ditch in the heat. Mocking Purple Heart veterans with purple thumbs and bandaids. Bringing home deceased from the war under cover of darkness. Denying casualty count if veterans die outside of Iraq or Afghanistan (for example, in military hospitals in Germany). Running U.S. military forces into the ground, then proposing to: cut the Reserve, cut Veterans’ benefits, cut VA funding, tack on $250 veterans’ medical co-pay. Lack of body / vehicle armor.

Many military members and their families still live in substandard housing on military bases around the world; some are forced to collect welfare just to make ends meet. There should be no homeless veterans, but the shame of the matter is, there are. Bush still has not attended even one military funeral, but John F. Kerry has.

The Environment: Almost every civilized nation signed the Kyoto Protocol, except the U.S.; environmental problems are being met with ignorance, denial, and shoddy research substituting as science; failure to warn emergency workers in NYC on 9/11 and in New Orleans in 2005 of environmental dangers; failure to recognize the reality of global warming, nor to take actions to mitigate the effects; oil and natural gas drilling proposed in environmentally fragile areas in Alaska and the Rockies; strip mining in the Cumberland Mountains; synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides on our lawns, in our parks, and in the watershed. Our oceans are dying; the coral beds are only the first symptom, but once the oceans are dead, so are we. The polar caps are melting at faster rates than anyone ever thought they would, opening up the Arctic ocean to resource exploitation, international border disputes, environmental damage, etc. Washington is governed by a bipartisan consensus that somehow the laws of physics and chemistry don’t apply to us.

Trade: The commerce department reported recently that the overall trade gap climbed to an all-time high of $725.8 billion last year. The deficit was up 17.5% from ‘04, marking the fourth straight record. The trade deficits have contributed to the loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since mid-’00 as U.S. companies moved production overseas to lower-waged nations. Many economists believe those manufacturing jobs will never come back. Corporate outsourcing is contributing to this problem. The $201.6 billion trade deficit with China was the highest in history ever recorded with any country.

Energy: Cut funds for alternate energy while scolding Americans for being addicted to oil (Bush and his cronies have made their fortunes on oil - remember pic of Bush holding hands with Saudi Prince Bandar); Cheney’s secret energy meetings with Big Oil onboard and refusal to release documents relating to these meetings. If nuclear energy is as safe and clean as Bush says it is, why does the United States have so much trouble safely disposing of its nuclear waste, much less telling the truth about the proposed nuclear waste storage sites?

The People: Systemic vote fraud, intimidation at polling places, purged voter rolls; Americans cling to an idealized image of our political integrity, but a look at how we run our elections tells a very different tale.

The CIA has spent the last seven years covertly sifting through millions of pages of decades-old public archives (meaning, we The People own them) and removing documents that the agency deems sensitive or embarrassing.

Torture, indefinite detention, broad-sweep illegal wiretapping and interception of communications; dissenters screened from presidential rallies and other events; free speech zones; surveillance of antiwar groups; surveillance of GLBT groups. The Justice Department is conducting an internal investigation into the illegal spying, but this is the same Justice Department, run by Alberto Gonzales, that has justified torture, approved the indefinite imprisonment of people around the world, approved extraordinary rendition of ghost prisoners, approved the illegal spying in the first place, and defended it all along. Forgive me if I’m not placated nor optimistic that anything will be done to stop it.

Unconstitutional bribes / kickbacks to various Christian churches in the Faith-Based Initiatives. The rules seem simple: the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution charges the government with guaranteeing religious freedom while prohibiting it from advancing the interests of any one church or faith. Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Find a list of funding recipients (churches or organizations) online since the inception of the program in 2001. Note that if you find this list, there is only one major faith represented. Guess which faith that is.

The Corporate establishment owns both major political parties, as well as the voting machines and the traditional media outlets (many people fail to recognize that the REAL battle is between the People and the Corporations for control of our government; it is not Republican v. Democrat). 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown. Most have jobs, some have two or three, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening.

George Bush wants to let Dubai World Ports [a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, a nation linked to the 9/11 hijackers] take control of 6 of the largest ports in the U.S.: New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. Shipping ports are already the most vulnerable part of national security, since 95% of imported goods come by ship. Yet only 5% of cargo containers - which could easily hide WMD’s - are physically inspected. Mind you, Chinese companies control some of our other important ports, so the question begs to be asked, ‘Why aren’t these ports under control by American companies?’ Do we simply not have the expertise to run our own ports?

Bush consolidates power for himself and his cronies while seeding fear of dissent (through systematically labelling dissenters as unpatriotic or friendly to our nation’s enemies) as civil liberties and constitutional protections are dismantled via the NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, the DEA, and other policing agencies. Freedoms we should strenuously preserve have been systematically dismantled by this government, leaving us at the mercy of future tyrants.

“The public-relations gloss that has long wrapped the Bush administration is fast becoming a blemish on the White House, according to lawmakers who have uncovered some $1.6 billion in federal funds spent on promoting various administration-sponsored programs.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s research and auditing body, tracks more than 340 contracts negotiated between several government departments and PR, advertising and media firms from 2003 through the first part of 2005.

The study, requested by the House of Representatives Democratic leadership, found that from 2003 to mid-2005, the administration racked up some $1.4 billion in contracts with advertising agencies to broadcast positive messages about its policies and initiatives. Another $200 million went to public-relations companies, and $15 million were spent building connections with media outlets. Individual members of the press received a total of $100,000 in promotional contracts.” [Source]

What a shame that money wasn’t spent on relieving poverty in the United States. Bush is more concerned with maintaining tax cuts for the already-wealthy. How compassionate and conservative of him… not.

War on Drugs: If we live in a fundamentally free society, how does confining a drug offender to 17 years in prison jibe with America’s values of equality and liberty? A marijuana grower can get life in prison without parole, while a murderer might be in for eight years. No rational person can defend this. A good case can be made that marijuana prohibition costs too much — in money, but also in ruined lives and harm done to society. At any one time, 59,300 prisoners charged with or convicted of violating marijuana laws (3.3% of the total incarcerated population) are behind bars, at a total cost to taxpayers of some $1.2 billion per year. We cannot address poverty and race in America, nor can we talk about needless death and expense, without addressing the failed drug war.

Our current anti-drug tactics are underminding government stabilization, the war on terrorism, and even the anti-drug tactics themselves. Billions of dollars spent, tens of thousands incarcerated, and marijuana is still as popular as ever.

‘Coca-Cola, the globally recognized soft drink manufacturer, buys 115 tonnes of coca leaf from Peru and 105 tonnes from Bolivia per year, with which it produces, without alkaloids, 500 million bottles of soda per day.’ [Source]

Human Rights: What human rights? The U.S. has already negated just about every commonly agreed to measure of what constitutes “human rights” in it’s “war on terrorism.” America (and the UK), Archbishop Desmond Tutu says, uses the same arguments as the government of PW Botha to detain prisoners without trial; no habeas corpus, no due process. There is a White House civil liberties panel that has never actually met or done anything, despite an act of Congress passed over a year ago.

In the beginning, the Bush Administration claimed the ‘detainees’ were the “the worst of the worst.” But we still don’t know who they all are. We know from released detainees and FBI personnel, from military memoranda and orders issued, that the Bush Administration, having cast aside the Geneva Convention, also dismissed the Convention against Torture, the U.S. Army interrogation manual and the longstanding U.S. military tradition against using torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment against its prisoners. We know because we’ve seen the photographs. We also know that this style of treatment migrated from the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Torture and mistreatment have been a deliberate part of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, undermining the global defense of human rights.

In 2005, the United States executed the 1000th person since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. More than 120 people have been released from death row since 1976 due to evidence of their innocence. The United States ranks only behind China, Iran, and Vietnam in the number of executions on an annual basis — countries responsible for other serious human rights violations condemned by the U.S. State Department. Arbitrariness, unfairness, and economic and racial bias continue to plague the death penalty, highlighting the necessity of its abolition.

Science: Killed stem cell research and lied about it; Intelligent Design, a faith-based curriculum that is best taught in churches, not publicly funded schools, is an assault on science and the scientific method; measures to suppress, intimidate, and distort science, scientists, scientific results; denial of global warming; denial of peak oil. Bush’s proposed budget for NASA and his plans for moon and Mars explorations force NASA to make troubling cuts in aeronautics, earth science, and other science programs; it’s just another big, under-funded hardware program that winds up costing more, doing less and cannibalizing other important scientific research.

And, yes, I dare say that Mr. Kerry (or even Mr. Gore) would have handled things with more competence and that he possesses more experience in shutting down political and corporate corruption. Again, I hold those who voted for Bush responsible for this litany of “mistakes” “maneuvers” or “intentions.” Only a fool wants never to learn from his mistakes. Fix it.

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