Rotten to the Core

I never understood, early in the Bush years, how the American public could be so complacent, how the citizens of this country could have been so completely fooled, led like lambs to the slaughter of our Constitution. I could never figure out just how it was that the Bush Administration was able to fool the people of this nation into believing that Saddam Hussein was responsible in some way for the tragedy of September 11th, and that Iraq, in all of it's poverty, with no Air Force, no Navy, it's population driven to starvation by sanctions, could have ever posed a threat to our country. After spending the weekend with my 2 year old nephew, and my four year old niece, I think I understand the phenomenon of brain death in our population. Children. How can you possibly have time to think about things like national security, when every waking moment is spent trying to get kids to eat, sleep, get shoes on, go to the bathroom, get in the car, stop screaming, take a bath, brush their teeth? How can people function in the world when going to the grocery store takes two hours? You have to get the kid dressed, get him down the stairs to the car, and then, oops, he is screaming for his yellow tractor, so you have to go back upstairs and get it, and once in the car, he wants out of his car seat, so you have to distract him by singing Happy Birthday, but it's not enough just to sing it to him, when you have finished the song, you have to then sing it to everyone, Mommy and Daddy, Grandma, Uncle John, Kevin, the snot-nosed kid next door, Grandma Dawn and her new boyfriend, (who is only 28, and unemployed), and Nemo, the fictional fish in his favorite movie.

How can you possibly think about national security when you have the Happy Birthday Song running through your mind every waking moment of the day?

I can forgive the American public for the Bush years. I can even forgive Americans for electing George Bush for a second term. Searching out the truth in the past eight years has taken bloggers like myself and Bruce, many hours of squinting at a computer screen, in the late hours of the evening, and even today I find that I have a hard time sifting what is fact, from the sands of drivel that is touted as journalism today. But I can't forgive those elected officials who after being given the trust of those parents, exhausted from long hours at work, long hours with the immediate needs of children, I can't forgive George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the host of lawyers who enabled them. I never agreed with torture, never bought into the evil necessity, but I was willing to imagine a scenario where it might be better to save innocent lives, the horrible end justifying the horrific means. But there was never such a situation. I always knew that the Bush Administration was rotten to the core, but I never imagined that Bush and Cheney took America over to the dark side, to try to justify a greater evil, not a greater good. Frank Rich from the Times lays out the truth, in all it's shame.

Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

So America, the home of the free, and the land of the brave, America, committed heinous acts, illegal in all civilized nations, our country, did these things not to save lives, but to try to justify more illegal acts, the horrible, unforgivable, act of war.

And for that, we cannot forgive, we cannot excuse.

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