Just Another Day In The Empire

Tuesday brought one of the more entertaining newsreading days in quite some time.

Remember Muhsin Abdul Hameed? ... For those who have forgotten, Abdul Hameed was chosen as one of the rotating presidents back in 2003. Mohsin was actually, er, Mr. February 2004, if you will. [...]

We woke up this morning to the interesting news that Muhsin Abdul Hameed had also been detained! [...]

The Americans are saying Muhsin was "detained and interviewed", which makes one think his car was gently pulled over and he was asked a few questions. What actually happened was that his house was raided early morning, doors broken down, windows shattered; and he and his three sons had bags placed over their heads, and were dragged away. They showed the house, and his wife, today on Arabiya; and the house was a disaster. The cabinets were broken, tables overturned, books and papers scattered, etc.. An outraged Muhsin was on TV a few minutes ago talking about how the troops pushed him to the floor, and how he had an American boot on his neck for twenty minutes.

The vice president said he expected the war would end during President Bush's second term, which ends in 2009.

"I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

"Clearly"?! What the fuck "clearly"?! The only thing "clear", to me, is that I'm just about ready to put my shoe a little more than half-way up your fucking cornhole, Dick. And what the fuck kind of logic is he using? Two years in to the occupation, four years to go, and the resistance is in its "last throes". What is he, trying out for Monty Python or something?

The son of a bitch was on a roll, too:

One Guantanamo prisoner told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he wets his pants now. Another detainee claimed U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity. Tales of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among some 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the U.S. government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit -- the second batch of documents the AP has received in 10 days.

But...

"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously."

And, well, Dick Cheney's track record is so much more reliable than Amnesty's... (Actually, it might be interesting to see how often Cheney has referenced Amnesty with regard to Saddam's crimes.) And, er, Amnesty didn't suggest that the U.S. is a human rights violator (perish the thought!). Rather, it suggested that Guantanamo is the "gulag of our time" -- rather a more damning suggestion than Cheney is even willing to acknowledge.

But, maybe ol' Dick had read an advance copy of to-day's Christian Science Monitor:

That decision is part of an increasingly strident joint U.S.-Iraqi effort to limit Iraqi abuse of detainees that -- amid the heat of a vicious insurgency -- threatens to undermine the rule of law.

But a generation of extrajudicial abuse under Saddam Hussein means that many street-level members of the Iraqi forces still resort to violence. [...]

"[Prisoner abuse] is not something we see every day, but [weekly] we see a prisoner come in, and someone has gone too far," says U.S. Army Col. Ronnie Johnson, deputy commander of the 256th Brigade Combat Team, which fields advisory teams for Iraqi units.

In the past two weeks, US forces have stepped up their intervention in such cases, and sought to make rudimentary detention centers more humane. [...]

"It's ingrained in this culture to be brutal to your enemy," says Colonel Johnson, from Baton Rouge, La. "They look at us and wonder why we worry about such things. At the soldier level, they just have a different concept. We tell them: 'There is no correlation between beating someone [hard], and getting good information.'"

What is he, trying out for the George Orwell Olympics? If so, he'll have to compete with this guy:

The International Committee of the Red Cross "has been at Guantanamo since day one," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. "It is essentially a model facility."

Quoting letters of the fallen from the war in Iraq, President Bush vowed Monday to a Memorial Day audience of military families and soldiers in uniform that the nation will honor its dead by striving for peace and democracy, no matter the cost. [...]

Bush's nine-minute address was punctuated eight times by applause from a crowd of military families, some of whom were accompanied by soldiers in wheelchairs recovering from their wounds.

One can imagine that Dick Cheney, sitting at Mission Control, was whispering into Bush's earpiece something along the lines of the following: "And for God's sake, don't say the part about all the costs being borne by the niggers and the wetbacks...that part is just between you and me."

Two days after winning re-election last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained. [...]

"There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly," said an influential GOP member of Congress. "The term I hear most often is, 'Tin ear,'" especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gas prices. "We could not have a worse message at a worse time." [...]

In recent meetings, House Republicans have discussed putting more pressure on the White House to move beyond Social Security and talk up different issues such as health care and tax reform, according to Republican officials who asked not to be named to avoid angering Bush's team. [Pace Condoleezza Rice: "It is a wonderful thing that people can speak their minds. Yes, ladies and gentlemen; in Baghdad and Kabul and soon in Beirut, they too will be able to speak their minds. What a wonderful thing democracy is."] [...]

Bush has had a hard time persuading Congress to go along with his agenda, in part, because surveys show much of the public has soured on him and his priorities. [...]

Such weakness has unleashed the first mutterings of those dreaded second-term words, lame duck, however premature it might be with 3½ years left in his tenure.

And that brings us to the most entertaining quote of this most entertaining newsday, from Reagan-era Chief-of-Staff Kenneth Duberstein: "The president needs to define victories in ways that he can achieve them."

Like, instead of "spreading freedom" to the entire world, we can maybe just start with one city (viz., Baghdad). Oops, even that is too much to ask:

"Getting control of a city of 5 million is not an easy proposition," said a senior U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

Perhaps, then, we could start with successfully eating a pretzel while watching Monday Night Football; and once we've mastered that task, move on to bigger and better things.

And that's the way it was.

Posted by Eddie Tews at May 31, 2005 08:38 PM