Eric Smith

Looks like Bush and his ilk have finally discovered Hell, and it turns out to indeed be other people.

First, Korea times its troop withdrawal announcement for the day of Bush's arrival.

And as the rats begin their frantic scurrying, Ghoul-in-Chief Rumsfeld shows his complete lack of shame, blurting out the outrageous lie that he never advocated the invasion.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government calls yet again for withdrawal, echoing the wishes of 83% of the civilian population (according to the British Ministry of Defense) and earlier desperate attempts to get rid of us.

And although Chief Pan Troglodytes publicly rhapsodizes about how "wonderfully" the occupation's proceeding, those with their boots are apparently in a completely different world than Bush's.

So, even though the two top commanders in the debacle have already delivered their detailed plans for ending the occupation, in answer, Bush's latest bumbling has become a metaphor for the Red House's hellish vision: for Americans and Iraqis in the Hell of occupied Iraq there will be no exit. It's "stay the course until evil has been vanquished", a patently never ending and completely arbitrary goal.

A brief glimpse at current developments in colonial Iraq is a further maddening exercise in doublethink, with irony piling upon irony.

For example "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and similar exploits have delivered not freedom, but incarceration to more than 83,000 in the last four years, even though a staggering 70 to 90 percent of those still being held in Iraq ARE KNOWN TO BE COMPLETELY INNNOCENT.

And we've certainly extracted more than our pound of flesh as, by now, far more died in Iraq than in all the terrorist attacks throughout history combined.

Those who have experienced its horrors firsthand are trying to uphold America's historic abhorrance of torture, but the walking national embarrassment called Bush is still threatening to veto any legal measures, blithely unaware of the irony in light of his own words:

The capture of this man was crucial to the rise of a free Iraq. It marks the end of the road for him, and for all who bullied and killed in his name. For the Baathist holdouts largely responsible for the current violence, there will be no return to the corrupt power and privilege they once held. For the vast majority of Iraqi citizens who wish to live as free men and women, this event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever.

Now we learn the nuthatches directing the slaughter on our behalf have been repopulating the new and improved Iraqi army overwhelmingly with Saddam's own elite (the very folks who were lobbing mortars and firing bullets at our troops months, weeks and perhaps even days ago).

So it comes as no surprise that we have been fostering a generation of professional Jeffery Dahmers, who have been secretly torturing our own informants in the most ghastly ways imaginable -- and with the covert assistance of some folks who harbor little fondness for us:

So far, it appears that the facts are these: that Iraq's interior ministry, whose top officials, strike forces and police commando units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are controlled by paramilitary units from Shiite militias, maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones, with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units of death-squad commandos are killing countless other Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi opposition. Even the Washington Post, that last-ditch defender of America's illegal and unprovoked assault on Iraq, says:

Scandal over the secret prison has forced the seven-month-old Shiite-led government to confront growing charges of mass illegal detentions, torture and killings of Sunni men. Members of the Sunni minority, locked in a struggle with the Shiite majority over the division of power in Iraq, say men dressed in Interior Ministry uniforms have repeatedly rounded up Sunni men from neighborhoods and towns. Bodies of scores of them have been found dumped by roadsides or in gullies.

The New York Times reports that the Iraqi interior minister isn't all that upset about the torture center. Bayan Jabr, "speaking of the prison in an angry sarcastic tone, said, 'There has been much exaggeration about this issue.' And he added, "Nobody was beheaded.'" So, apparently not beheading innocents is the standard of justice in the New Iraq. And, apparently there may be dozens, scores or hundreds of similar facilities.

This is not a surprise.

Nearly two years ago, writing in the American Prospect, I wrote the following: "The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups...The bulk of the covert money will support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force." Except for a parallel story by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker, the story was ignored.

Over the past two years, writing for TomPaine.com, I have repeatedly written about Shiite death squads and about abuses by the paramilitary Badr Brigade, the secret army trained and run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and opposition leaders, including Aiham Al Sammarae (as I wrote for TomPaine ) have charged that the Iraqi government has been running assassination teams. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been killed already, including two attorneys for those accused in the kangaroo court set up to convict Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi government officials. The Post suggests that the prison uncovered in Baghdad was a "secret torture center run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran." Read that again: intelligence agents from Iran.

Then of course, there's our use of chemical weapons on the Iraqi population, another of the ostensible reasons for Bush's invasion.

So we claimed we'd free the iraqis, then jailed tens of thousands known to be innocent; we claimed to repudiate Hussein's torture policies, then surpassed him in our own efficiency at it; we claimed to want to rid Iraq of the WMDs Herr Rumsfeld and Bush Sr. had given him (which, as UN inspector Scott Ritter said three years ago had already been destroyed or rendered useless), then used our own WMD on its citizenry; we claimed to want to bring them a democracy, then rigged the vote; we claimed to embrace a free press, then began killing journalists and cracking down on dissent.

But, the smirking chimp waxes generous of late, pretending to welcome dissent, unless, of course, you happen to be a certain mother of a soldier killed in the quagmire, whose Constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and petitioning for redress are apparently less than those of certain high-profile Congressmen.

And then there's the tricky little Constitutional issue of a certain US citizen who's been jailed without trial or charges for 3 Years and 197 Days on the mere sayso of the White House.

Seems as though lately, America has become... well, downright UnAmerican.

Read the rest at:

peace,

Eric

GOP: RIP.