George W. Bush: An American Hitler

By DOUG THOMPSON

In George W. Bush's petty, pathetic, partisan world, laws he doesn't agree with don't have to be obeyed, Congressional actions that differ from his political agenda can be ignored and the Constitution of the United States is just a "goddamned piece of paper."

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe brought this point home Sunday when he revealed Bush has chosen to ignore more laws passed by Congress than any President in history, appending more than 750 laws with "signing statements" that say, in effect, that he doesn't give a damn what the law says because he will do whatever he pleases as a "wartime president" and "commander-in-chief."

Of course it doesn't matter to him that he became a "wartime president" because he lied out his ass to justify an illegal invasion on Iraq based on fake intelligence and a determined policy of ignoring facts that disproved his lies. ...

As I had written earlier: the Bush administration is no longer a "presidency", it's a criminal conspiracy. It is also a tyranny. And the first victim of tyranny is the individual conscience.

As individuals act upon what they believe to be true, a people does so collectively. American hubris, self-importance, and self-appointed moral superiority is, like all falsehoods, the source of much evil throughout the world. Those evils are manifested recently in the worst American presidency in our history.

Aggressive war, torture, duplicity, deliberate deceptions, the abrogation of the very instruments by which Americans instituted the rule of law - all are hallmarks of this Bush "administration", best described as a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law.

We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another 30 to 40 years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. ...

-Exporting the American Model

Of course, Bush KNOWS that making the middle east safe for Democracy is absolute, right wing crap! A party that has to resort to election theft in its own country is hardly in a position to propose "free elections" in another.

A ruthless dictator who abjures the Constitution in America is hardly in a position to demonize Saddam Hussein.

A lawless bigot in the White House is hardly in a position to talk about the blessings of democracy if they could but wipe out those mean ol' "turrsts" in Iraq!

As more and more is learned about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the torture flights and cold blooded murders of civilians by U.S. troops, I've concluded that the war against Iraq was not even about oil, though Bush's base - the robber barons of big oil - have profited exponentially!

NO! There are no rational explanations for continuing to perpetrate counter productive policies of bluster, aggressive war, war crimes, torture, and ghastly, perverted tortures and murders. Therefore, Bush's real reasons for attacking and waging an ongoing war crime in Iraq are personal. Bush, a known alumnus of the super secretive Illuminati society called Skull and Bones, apparently just wants to get his jollies by murdering folk by proxy. For Bush's base of oil oligarchs, it's about the plunder of oil; but for Bush it's about the psychotic perversions of an out of control maniac in the White House.

Hersh might have said that we'd also had a "collapse" of the media in the United States, a total disintegration of the Ed Murrow/Howard K Smith/ Daniel Elsworth/Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward school of journalism. The greying, bespectacled, obscenity-swearing Hersh is about all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world (save for the jibes of Maureen Dowd in The New York Times).

So it's good to know he's still doing some fighting, including other journalists on his target list. "I know some serious generals," he says. "I can't urge them to go public. They'd be attacked by Fox (TV), and the (New York) Times and The Washington Post would wring their hands. It's a mechanism. You don't get rewarded in the newsroom for being a malcontent." Journalists on the mainstream papers are largely middle-class college graduates - not reporters who came up the hard way like Hersh's street reporting in Chicago in his early days. They have largely no connection to the immigrants' society. "They don't know what it's like to be on social welfare. Their families weren't in Vietnam and their families are not in Iraq." The BBC, too, has "fallen off the way".

So what is the Hersh school of journalism? "In my business, I get information I check it out and I find it's not true - that's what my business is. Now there is (also) stuff in the military from people I don't know - I don't touch it ... I was seeing (President) Bashar (Assad of Syria) at the time of the assassination of (former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq) Hariri. There was obviously bad blood between Bashar and Hariri. Bashar was saying that Hariri wanted to take over the cell-phone business in Damascus. To this day I don't know what happened. I saw Bashar from 11am until 1pm (on February 14, 2005). He talked about what a thief Hariri was. I didn't write it."

And there goes a scoop about bad blood, I said to myself. But on Iran, it was something different for Hersh. He was talking to a contact. "I brought up Iran. 'It's really bad,' he said. 'You ought to get into it. You can go to Vienna and find out how far away (from nuclear weapons production) they are.' Then he told me they were having trouble walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don't want to speak out - they want the shit on my head."

As Hersh said in his New Yorker report, nuclear planners routinely go through options - "we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," he quotes one of them as saying - but once the planners try to argue against all this, they are shouted down. According to another intelligence officer quoted by Hersh, "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you'." In other words, once the planners routinely put options on the table, the options become possibilities to be considered rather than technical reports.

"That whole Johns Hopkins speech," Hersh goes on, referring to the address in which Bush attacked Hersh's own article, "he talked about the wonderful progress in Iraq. This is hallucinatory - and there are people on a high level in the Pentagon and they can't get the President to give this up. Because it's crazy.

"In the UK, you might have some crazy view - but you knew it was. But these guys (in Washington) are talking in revelations. Bush is a revelatory at bedtime - he has to take a nap. It's so childish and simplistic. And don't think he's diminished. He's still got two years ... he's not diminished. We've still got a Congress that can't articulate opposition. This is a story where I profoundly hope, at every major point, that I'm wrong."

Hersh has also been casting his wizened eye on the Brits. "Your country is very worried about what Bush is going to do - your people" - Hersh means the Foreign Office - "are really worried. There are no clearances ... no consultations."

In Washington, "advocating humanity, peace, integrity is not a value in the power structure ... my government are incapable of leaving (Iraq). They don't know how to get out of Baghdad. We can't get out. In this war, the end is going to be very, very messy - because we don't know how to get out. We're going to get out body by body. I think that scares the hell out of me."

It's all put neatly by one of Hersh's sources in the Pentagon: "The problem is that the Iranians realise that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the US. Something bad is going to happen." What was that line from Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, when he asked Sam, his pianist, what time it is in New York? Sam replies that his watch has stopped, and Bogart says, "I bet they're asleep in New York. I'll bet they're asleep all over America." Except for Hersh.

"No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation," he said.

Russia, which is trying to harness its position as an energy giant, drew international criticism earlier this year when it briefly turned off its gas taps to Ukraine in a pricing dispute that disrupted supply to Europe.

Moscow has also warned Europe the Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom -- the world's top gas producer -- could divert its supplies to Asia if it is barred from the European retail gas market.

Cheney's harsh remarks could further antagonize Russia, which holds a veto in the U.N. Security Council where Washington intends to push for a resolution demanding Iran curb its nuclear ambitions. Russia opposes any sanctions.

He said opponents of reform in Russia were "seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade" by restricting democratic rights and warned President Vladimir Putin some of Moscow's actions could hurt relations with other countries.

But Cheney told leaders of post-communist nations with a history of domination by the former Soviet Union: "None of us believes that Russia is fated to become an enemy."

He said G-8 members planned to make clear at a summit in St. Petersburg in July Moscow had "nothing to fear and everything to gain from strong stable democracies on its borders."

The address by Cheney, a powerful, independent-minded vice president known for a hard line on Russia within the administration, marked an intensification of U.S. and European Union criticism against Moscow for its record on democracy.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana also addressed the conference and, like Cheney, referred to diplomatic tensions with Russia.

Russia suspects the U.S. policy of promoting global democracy is really an instrument to establish itself as the dominant power in the post-Soviet states.

In the past two years, peaceful revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia have brought pro-Western governments to power.

Solana made clear Europe hoped Belarus, a key Russian ally, would follow suit. "The European Union will continue to support the aspirations the people of Belarus," he said. "One day, I'm sure, they will see a democratic breakthrough in their country."

Cheney called Belarus the last dictatorship in Europe and urged the immediate release of opposition leader Aleksander Milinkevich as well as other opposition members.

"Peaceful demonstrators have been beaten, dissidents have vanished and a climate of fear prevails under a government that subverts free elections... there is no place in a Europe whole and free for a regime of this kind."

He also said Russia had restricted human rights.

"In many areas of civil society -- from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties -- the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the people," he said.

Cheney was on six-day trip billed as a pro-democracy tour. Lithuania, which regained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was the first stop. He also planned to visit oil-rich Kazakhstan and the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia.

Besides China and Russia, Rice mentioned Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Iran as examples of societies that have cracked down on press freedom in recent times.

"While the United States will continue working to advocate for greater global press freedom, all free societies carry the responsibility to press restrictive governments to allow an open press," Rice said. "Independent media empowers people, exposes corruption, encourages transparency and prompts participation in the political process. Without it, society as a whole suffers."

Rice's statement hit China for its Internet policies, saying 62 cyber dissidents are being held in prison and specifying Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times.

He was charged with revealing state secrets in a 2004 story in the Times about changes within China's leadership, but the charges were dropped on March 17. Three days later, his lawyer said a new investigation had begun, and Zhao remains in jail.

In Russia, Rice said, "the government continued to weaken media independence, particularly of major television networks."

The statement also spelled out different kinds of press repression in Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Iran.

Rice alleged that Zimbabwean security forces "selectively harassed, beat and arbitrarily arrested members of the media."

For Venezuela, she cited "new laws governing libel and broadcast media content, legal harassment against journalists and physical intimidation" as government actions that result in "limitations on press freedoms and a climate of self-censorship."

"In Iran, press freedom has eroded," Rice said. Journalists have been harassed and imprisoned, she said, and she cited the January closure by the Iranian Culture Ministry of the daily newspaper Asia and banning of a planned women's publication, Nour-e-Banovan.

Iran's hardline judiciary began in 2000 a press crackdown that has led to the closure of more than 100 pro-democracy publications on vague charges of insulting religious sensibilities or top clerics.

The Bush administration has been accused by some of being the most dismissive of the press since that of president Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

President George W. Bush has ordered investigations to find leakers whose information led to disclosures of questionable government activities, mostly involving Bush's campaign against terrorists. He also has tightened declassification rules for papers from previous presidencies.

Rice and French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy are scheduled to attend a meeting in New York on Monday of top diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia to weigh a response to Iran's disputed nuclear program.

A separate meeting on the Middle East with envoys from the
European Union, Russia, the United States and the
United Nations is set for Tuesday. That session could allow for a possible dinner meeting between Rice and Douste-Blazy, according to a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A report by the UN envoy tasked with settling of the Syrian-Lebanese dispute, Terje Roed-Larsen, has prompted interest in fresh measures by the UN Security Council, McCormack said.

"Certainly in the wake of Terje Larsen's report, we think that some other measure through the Security Council might be merited," he said.

"We're going to talk to the French government about that. We've worked very well together on this issue, and we look forward to doing so in the future."

France said last week that it was preparing a draft resolution that would urge Syria to respond to Lebanon's call for establishment of formal diplomatic ties between the two neighbors and for a demarcation of their common border.