who are objecting to his choice for Attorney General, Giuliani pal and
likeminded authoritarian Michael Mukasey. Bush ,instead of having a
formal press conference, asked a group of reporters to the oval
office, leaned back and gave his pronouncements on behalf of his newly
anointed vassal, Mukasey.
Bush started with the greatest distortion of all, the one that is
rarely answered by anyone including the left in the U.S, that is, that
Mukasey's opponents "have lost sight of the fact that we are at war."
It is time that someone tell the naked emperor that no one fights a
"war" against terrorism and terrorists except in rhetorical way
All nations and all alliances of nations who have fought terrorist
groups have realized that terrorism is a police matter. The French
realized it in Algeria in the 1950s, although it ultimately didn't do
them much good. All of the European nations, some of whom face
greater ongoing threats from terrorist groups than the U.S. recognize
it today. What the Bush administration "war against terrorism" has
produced is hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted U.S. taxpayers
money and interest payments on a national debt which has more than
doubled in the Bush years, providing superprofits for the military
industrial complex, oil companies and a variety of other private
contractors(the wealth of the bin Laden family, whose investments are
located in those areas to a considerable extent, for example has gone
up substantially thanks to the Bush administration "war against
terrorism"). What Bush's phoney war has done has been to undermine
any policy that would focus effectively on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
Saudi Arabia, the real nexus for the Al Quaida group both in terms of
money, recruits, and organization, preventing any concerted
international action to both break up Al Quaida and address the
economic misery and polical tyranny on which it feeds.
Bush has given the terrorists the recognition that they crave; he has
created conflicts with most of the major nations of the world, which
has undermined international police and intelligence cooperation to
fight the terrorists. He has embarked upon an invasion and occupation
of Iraq which has been a godsend to Al Quaida, giving enabling them to
expand their operations while their centers in Pakistan particularly
remain untouched.
On the question of the use of methods like waterboarding(regarded
generally as torture) in interrogations, Bush had one of his moments
when he refused to deal with any specific interrogation "method,"
saying "it doesn't make sense to tell the enemy whether we use those
techniques or not."
Wow. The President thinks that the terrorist groups don't know
through the grapevine what methods are being used. They, along with
the interrogators, are the ones most likely to know.
"People," Bush went on to say, "who say we are not at war are either
disingenuous or naive." One should answer that people who passively
accept the administration war proclamations are sad evidence that the
old "big lie" strategy associated with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda minister, still works. That is, you say something
outrageous, say it over and over again, have people in authority say
it over and over again, and people accept it and say it over and over
again, e.g., Germany in 1939 was invaded by Poland and was merely
defending itself(which was the Nazi propaganda line).
The only good news to emerge from all of this are the reports that
there are those in the administration who remain worried about future
prosecutions for their involvement in the torture of prisoners in the
U.S.(not at some international tribunal, where those defendants might
be arguing that the U.S. wasn't really at war if they were charged
with war crimes). That is apparently why they were relieved that
Mukasey didn't answer whether he regarded waterboarding illegal. If
he said yes, it would be easier to prosecute them. If he said no, it
would be harder to get him confirmed.
All of that means that there is still hope to defend the rule of law
in the U.S. Defeating the Mukasey nomination is a step in preserving
the rule of law from Generalissimo Bush and his civilian-military
Junta government
Norman Markowitz
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