An honorable general gets the axe

By DOLPH HONICKER

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. --George Bernard Shaw

... we have violated the laws of warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and ... the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe ... that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.--Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Why in the name of God -- if there’s such a being -- create a nation in which its leaders countenance medieval torture ... warrantless wiretaps on its subjects ... imprisonment without the right of trial ... questionable elections ... a milquetoast media and a timid legislative branch?

Yes, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia come to mind. But that was yesterday. Today is today.

With a pair of lame ducks pooping on them, why doesn’t a nation of sheep tire of the embarrassment, tune out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton, rise up as one and, like the star of the movie “Network,” shout, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more?”

Realistically, what kind of a president allows his minions to send Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey to Iraq as part of a transport unit?

Who is Maj. Bowlsbey and why should this long-time National Guardsman, the director of the Illinois Veterans’ Affairs Department, get a free ride?

In the months before being shipped out, Bowlsbey was getting his home readied so that his invalid wife could get around. She’s missing two legs.

In 2005, his wife, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, was piloting a Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq when it was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. She tried vainly to control the chopper by pressing on the rudders.

She couldn’t feel them. Her right leg was shredded to the hipbone. Her left leg was shot off just below the knee, her right arm broken in three places. She lost almost half her blood.

One assumes that because Tammy Duckworth ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2006 on an anti-war campaign, denouncing the policies of President George W. Bush, had nothing to do with Maj. Bowlsbey’s deployment.

You have the right to assume that.

Meanwhile, is the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh the only reporter digging through the muck of the Bush/Cheney torture policy as enunciated by the know-nothing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez?

Hersh’s latest report details how an honorable general, Antonio Taguba, tried to tell the truth and was steamrollered by the White House and his peers in the Army.

In his first meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Taguba told Hersh that an old friend, Lt. Gen. Banz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, met him at the door and coldly told him, “Wait here.”

When ushered in, Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice, “Here ... comes that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba Report!”

Also in the meeting: Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.

All professed ignorance of Abu Ghraib.

Asked if he had found abuse or torture, Taguba recalled telling the group: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Tugaba says Rumsfeld denied seeing his in-depth investigative report despite having sent dozens of copies through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command Headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., which ran the Iraq War.

Also, before the meeting, Tugaba says he’d spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report.

He says when he urged one lieutenant general to look at the photos, the officer rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with information, once you know what they show?”

Gen. Myers testified that in January of 2004 information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. ... And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Yet, testifying before Senate and House Armed Service Committees on May 7, Rumsfeld, said, “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Taguba told Hersh he was appalled, saying the secretary was in denial. Had an aide withheld the facts?

“Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap,” said Taguba. “There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

What particularly galled Taguba was that Rumsfeld was accompanied by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

In January 2006, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice-chief of staff, calls Taguba, who’d served 34 active years, and says, “I need you to retire by January 2007.” No chit-chat, though the two had known each other for years. Then Cody hangs up.

"They always shoot the messeger," Taguba told Hersh. "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

The message is: Don’t rock the bleeping boat.

Pythian Press.

When in Nice, wear sandals

By DOLPH HONICKER

It was a lesson I should have learned when still wet behind the ears: never watch sausage being made or Congress at work.

But there I was viewing CSPAN as Democratic congresspersons tried vainly to pass a resolution to up the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour -- a pittance that hadn’t been changed in a decade -- as one Republican speaker after another rose to defend our troops, our flag and our record deficits. No, scratch that last item.

Having a weak stomach, I switched to the Discovery Channel. There I saw the No. 1 concern of my Republican friends. The channel was running a segment on yachts.

One of my favorite yachts was built for speed at 140 feet long and 26 feet wide. The master bedroom with its king-sized bed stretched from port to starboard. On a trial run, its owner got it up to 69 knots. That’s 74 miles an hour. Imagine the wake!

This fits the GOP axiom that a rising tide lifts all yachts. Leaky rowboats fend for themselves.

Was that yacht powered by 2,000 horsepower or 20,000 horsepower engines? I don’t recall. I just remember the owner smiling into the camera and saying, “When you open this up to maximum speed, it could burn up your credit card.”

Yeah.

Have no fear, Mr. Yacht Owner, President George W. Bush’s tax cuts that turn millionaires into multimillionaires will bail you out at the pump, and his pie-in-the-sky hydrogen program, run by nuclear power plants, will have your boat running on water vapors.

The speedy yacht sleeps ten plus its crew with a mere $30 million price sticker. And, when hurricane season approaches, you can avoid dings in the hull and bent windshield wipers by having it transported on specially built tankers to the Mediterranean off Monaco or Nice where the young maidens go topless on the pebble beaches.

Transportation cost? A shade over $200,000 one way. But, when you own a $30 million yacht, what’s a few hundred thou? Play your cards right and Bush-Cheney will reimburse you.

The yacht that really caught my eye was a large steamer built in 1921by the founder of Dodge auto works (I think his name was Dodge) which burned in 1926 and was refurbished a year or so later. Its original $2 million cost would be the equivalent of $100 million today -- chicken feed for the current crop of Bushonaires.

Teakwood furnishings, Jacuzzies and the all comforts of home (yours, not mine) abound in this floating luxury hotel.

But I offer this small bit of advice to neophyte yachtsmen sailing off to Nice. My wife and I were there in 1991. I was armed with a primitive video cam that weighed about 20 pounds. I zoomed in on the nubile beach scenery, swinging my neck from left to right. The next day in Avignon I woke up with a stiff neck that stayed that way for a month.

Note: Pebbles on the Nice beach hurt bare feet. This is not Florida. Wear sandals.

Pythian Press.

King George to be anointed?

By DOLPH HONICKER

More than one person close to President George W. Bush has said that he has a messianic complex. The Rev. Pat Robertson says that when Bush was governor of Texas Bush informed the evangelist that God had told him to run for president.

Since biblical happenings seem to occur in threes -- the Three Wise Men, Christ rising from the tomb on the third day, the Holy Trinity of Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost -- what could be so unusual about a third, self-anointed term for a man who considers himself above the law? In other words: King George.

Don't laugh.

At least don't laugh until you have absorbed National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20.

They were handed down by the White House May 9, although you did not read them in the Washington Post or the New York Times. If you'd been one of the few thousand readers of the Progressive, you could have read it in their May 18 issue.

To be brief, Bush's two directives grant the presidency extraordinary powers without apparent congressional approval.

WorldNetDaily.com columnist Jerome R. Corsi says the directives establish under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and "tribal" governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

Tribal? Once again the Indians get the shaft.

National emergency?

This smells of martial law.

Ah, as though Bush and his joined-at-the-hip president of vice, Dick Cheney, did not have enough power already.

Under the definitions (b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, economy, or government functions.

Another Katrina and perhaps another Michael ("Ya doin' a fine job, Brownie") could take over.

Under (c), (d) and (e), alphabetical agencies take over: COG, "Continuity of Government; COOP, "Continuity of Operations; and ECG, "Enduring Constitutional Government.

One thing bureaucracy never runs out of is letters. So under (h) we have NEFs, or "National Essential Functions," which must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities, and (i) PMEFs or "Primary Mission Essential Functions," those government functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.

The directives, which meander on for six and one-eighth finely printed pages, is another example of why lawyers in the Bush administration have nothing better to do than to grant more powers to their leader.

Will the Democrats put a stop to such nonsense?

Sure, just like they've dilly-dallied over halting the war in Iraq.

The worst national disasters that these directives do not seem to recognize is the Bush/Cheney administration itself.

Pythian Press.