The Conservatard

Another hidden feature of the recent Military Tribunal Bill that has already passed the House and soon to be passed in the Senate is a “Get out of jail free card” for president Bush and his New Jack City Posse. Jack Cafferty at CNN gives his two cents on the issue.

Mr. C is still deciding what to pack and what to leave behind. He has been told that almost anything that he can carry is fine. Just as long as any liquids are in sealed two ounces containers and they can all be packed in a single clear plastic bag.

With the House of Representatives passage of the “Military Tribunal’s Bill” and the Senate likely to pass it today only one question remains. When do we, being anybody that disagrees with the conservatard way, move into the internment camps?

It could be something like during the 1940’s when the US government decided to round up all the Japanese citizens in California and move them to detention camps. That is if “we” are lucky. It could be more like the Nazi camps during WWII.

Do you think Mr. Conservatard is exaggerating? Then you need to dig a little deeper my friend. In an article printed in the Los Angeles Times called The White House Warden professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale describes some of the hidden features in the Military Tribunal Bill.

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

…This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

…Legal residents who aren’t citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president’s suspicions.

Bruce Ackerman, Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2006

So if you have been offended by Mr. C’s occasional tongue in cheek names that he directs toward the people who are ruining this country, you can take heart. He will surely be labeled as an “enemy sympathizer” and placed in a deep dark cell somewhere. Never to upset the fragile illusion of what many in this glorious country call “The Republican Party”. Mr. C will soon be wishing that the Democrats could have been partying back in November 7^th of 1999 again.

By now everyone has heard or seen the FoxTard news interview with former president Bill Clinton. Some in the “media” have criticized him saying that he “blew up”. Frankly they are wrong. President Clinton has sat on the side lines for six years now, watching the Bushtards flushing the nation down the toilet without once criticizing the monkey in chief.

Keith Olbermann tells it like it is in the following clip. He defends Bill Clinton’s actions and points out what liars, cheats and cowards the conservatards really are. Is Mr. Olbermann the only real journalist on TV today? Mr. Conservatard thinks that if he is not the only “real” journalist then he is at least one of the most honest.

With the American public starting to finally wake up and understand that Mr. Bushtard and his company of neoconservatard goons have been lying to and/or cheating the American public for six years now, what do the conservatards do? They attack Clinton via the propaganda ministry also know as “Fox news” like they did when Clinton was in office. They are probably thinking “heck it worked then, why not now?”

However, as anybody who has ever been used and abused knows that sometimes enough is enough. I think that the FoxTard interview was just the final straw. Clinton probably thought to himself, “I’m not in office and not running for any public office, why not tell the truth”. For being brave, Mr. Conservatard gives former President Bill Clinton and Keith Olbermann “The Conservatard salute”. What that is exactly, Mr. C doesn’t have a clue, know but he will think of something.

Is torture wrong? Your damn right it is. Almost everybody in
America knows that. Our parents told us that torture is wrong when we were little kids. We teach our children that torturing is wrong. We teach that it is wrong to even torture pets and that it is wrong to torture insects by pulling off their wings. So why can’t supposedly respected officials get it thru their thick skulls that torture is wrong? Why is this even a debate for the US Senate?

Anybody that has been following the news is aware of the four Republican Senators that were resisting the approval of Bush’s “clarification” of the Geneva Conventions article three. However it seems that McCain and company finally caved in and let the school yard bullies in the White House have their way.

The facts are that these illegal programs have been going on for over four years, and really no real terrorists have been captured. This makes Mr. Conservatard wonder why the Bushtards are trying to make torture “legal” after doing the deed. Are they concerned that US intelligent forces will have the tools of torture they “need” to fight terrorism in the future? This is not likely, since several experts in extracting information from suspects say that torture, aside from the obvious moral issues, often leads to poor or misleading information.

Some editorials at the Washington Post with a piece called Bush Gets His Way and at the New York Times with an piece called A Bad Bargain start poking holes into this whole compromise between the Bushtards and the rebel Republican Senators that dared to question the king.

Here is a way to measure how seriously President Bush was willing to compromise on the military tribunals bill: Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying a path to wiggle out of its one real concession.

About the only thing that Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush’s agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant. The White House agreed to abide by the rules of courts-martial, which bar secret evidence. (Although the administration’s supporters continually claim this means giving classified information to terrorists, the rules actually provide for reviewing, editing and summarizing classified material. Evidence that cannot be safely declassified cannot be introduced.)

A Bad BargainNew York Times Editorial Staff.Published: September 22, 2006

Here’s a question reporters should be asking: If, as Suskind has alleged, the administration is aware that those harsh CIA interrogation tactics don’t really work — and no one is currently in CIA detention anyway — then why is this such an important issue for the White House? One possible answer: That this has nothing to do with the future; that it’s about giving them cover for their actions in the past.

Here’s another question reporters should be asking: Have the senators been assured that Vice President Cheney won’t get Bush to attach a “signing statement” to this bill, asserting his inherent powers, as he did the last time he signed torture legislation?Finally, as the White House gears up to use detainee policy as a political issue, it is incumbent on the press to remind the public that there are not only two choices: Doing it Bush’s way and letting terrorists go free. Even if the Democrats aren’t coherent about other alternatives, the press should be.

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 22, 2006

A writer from the L.A. Times named Rosa Brooks suggests that the Bushtards have an alternative goal to why they are pushing for a “clarification” of the Geneva Convention and how they are using this “debate” as a way to cover their chicken butts. In her editorial called “Our Torturer-in-Chief: Until Bush took office, the U.S. had no problem defining what is cruel and inhuman” Ms. Brooks poses the following ideals.

 

According to Bush, the problem is that Common Article 3, which prohibits “cruel,” “humiliating” and “degrading treatment” and “outrages upon personal dignity,” is vague. He claims it doesn’t give “clear” guidance about what is permitted and what is prohibited during interrogations.

That’s not what Bush is actually worried about, though. His real problem is precisely the opposite — Common Article 3 and the War Crimes Act aren’t nearly vague enough. If called on to determine whether several of the administration’s “alternative” techniques violate Common Article 3 — and thus the War Crimes Act — virtually any court in the land would agree that they do.Our Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” That’s vague too, but our courts have always managed to define it. As the Supreme Court put it in the 2002 case Hope vs. Pelzer, the argument that a standard is vague and provides insufficient notice of what’s prohibited just doesn’t cut it sometimes. Some practices are just plain “antithetical to human dignity” and characterized by “obvious” and “inherent” cruelty.

…. If in doubt, take any of the “alternative” methods that Bush wants to use on
U.S. detainees and imagine someone using those methods on your son or daughter. If the bad guys captured your son and tossed him, naked, into a cell kept at a temperature just slightly higher than an average refrigerator, then repeatedly doused him with ice water to induce hypothermia, would that be OK? What if they shackled him to a wall for days so he couldn’t sit or lie down without hanging his whole body weight on his arms? What if they threatened to rape and kill his wife, or pretended they were burying him alive? What if they did all these things by turns? Would you have any problem deciding that these methods are cruel?

… Back in 2002, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales warned Bush that some of his policies raised “the threat of domestic criminal prosecution.” But the extremists who have captured the White House ignored half a century of American law and the advice of the nation’s top military brass. Instead, Bush went ahead and authorized practices that even Gonzales predicted might be seen by “future prosecutors” as violations of the War Crimes Act.Today, the chickens are coming home to roost. But though the word “accountability” isn’t in the White House dictionary, there’s a long entry under “CYA — covering your ass.”

Rosa Brooks:
Los Angeles Times

September 22, 2006

To recap we all know that torture is wrong both morally and legally. We are a nation that believes in treating all people fairly. Many people including the white bread eating conservatards ancestors came to this country to escape torture.

We as a culture reject torture in all shapes and forms. Most mainstream religions of the world reject torture. So why should we condone it from our “elected” leaders? Leaders that are suppose to represent “We the People”. The fact is we shouldn’t. We should be ashamed of our leaders actions and condemn it openly and publicly. Those that practice torture should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, no matter who they are and what powers they hold.

This following article called Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture on AlterNet from September 7^th, 2006 brings to light how much money our intelligence and military actually spend on outside contractors. In fact the reason the US military used outside contractors in Iraq for “interrogation” of prisoners is so that the military and other government officials would not be held liable for war crimes.

Osama Bin Laden’s greatest victories in the crucial media war have been the series of prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and a number of detention centers across Iraq, the most infamous of which is Saddam Hussein’s former torture complex at Abu Ghraib.

According to a report by Corpwatch, what ties these facilities together are the abundance of private contractors involved in their operations. The Taguba Report (PDF) named four private contractors in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Steven Stephanowicz, an investigator for CACI, a multinational with extensive government contracts (92 percent of which are in defense), encouraged MPs under his command to terrorize inmates, and “clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.” …

…According to Amnesty, half of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were private contractors — about 30 in all. Torin Nelson was a military intelligence officer at Gitmo before becoming a CACI interrogator at Abu Ghraib. After the scandal broke, Nelson resigned and charged the military with scapegoating a handful of low-level soldiers — the only people who have been brought to trial for the abuses — to “divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system.” He said: “The problem with outsourcing intelligence work is the limit of oversight and control by the military administrators over the independent contractors.” …

…John Gannon, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence and now head of BAE Systems’ Global Analysis Group, told journalist Sebastian Abbot that an intelligence contractor “is going to look at a government requirement, and it’s going to go and find people wherever it can and get the greatest number of people at the lowest price and maximizing the profit to the business to do it.” “When I was in government hiring people,” he continued, “I was looking for the best possible people I could get … [but] that is not what the private sector does.” Gannon warned that these companies “are not looking to be right or looking to ensure that they are getting access to the best information and expertise; they are looking to please a customer at the lowest common denominator.” It’s as clear a case of ideology and cronyism trumping common sense as one could find.

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 7, 2006.

It is good to know that the safety of our country from the “Global Terrorist Threat” has not been bid out to the lowest bidder. Oh no, they have not been bid out at all. Most of these “contracts” were dished out without a bidding process at all. In fact the only way that most of these companies got any work from the government is by hiring ex-government conservatards and paying lots of money to conservatard candidates and the RNC.

When your government is behaves like a shady corporation and is run by rejects from the corporate world, it is hard to tell the difference between the tow. So if you think about it objectively who do you trust more? Shady corporate contractors or shady government organizations that are run by the Bushtards? Either way Mr. Conservatard sleeps much better at night knowing that the U.S.A. is protected by brave and true corporate mercenaries, war profiteers, and incompetent neo-conservative zealots.

Have you stopped to ask why you can’t bring liquids on airplanes? It was supposedly because of a terrorist plot by a London Al Qaeda local 666 were going to bring liquid chemicals onto several airplanes, mix them in flight, and then blow the plane up in mid flight. Realism aside, if you look at the details of what the suspected terrorists were going to use to blow up the Trans Atlantic flights with it quickly becomes evident that the use of liquid explosives are not practical.

In an article on the Raw Story called Sources: August terror plot is a ‘fiction’ underscoring police failures, Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Nigel Wylde, a former senior British Army Intelligence Officer gives his opinion on exactly how absurd the whole plot scenario is. It sounds more like the product of a third rate Hollywood action movie than a real world scenario. Perhaps the authors of “Path to 9/11” were the ones who helped script the scenario of the latest U.S./British triumph in the “War on Terror”.

Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Nigel Wylde, a former senior British Army Intelligence Officer, has suggested that the police and government story about the “terror plot” revealed on 10th August was part of a “pattern of lies and deceit.”

…According to security sources, the terror suspects were planning to board up to ten civilian airliners and detonate highly volatile liquid explosives on the planes in a spectacular terrorist operation. The liquid explosives — either TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide), DADP (diacetone diperoxide) or the less sensitive HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine) — were reportedly to be made on board the planes by mixing sports drinks with a peroxide-based household gel and then be detonated using an MP3 player or mobile phone.

… Once the fluids have been extracted, the process of mixing them produces significant amounts of heat and vile fumes. “The resulting liquid then needs some hours at room temperature for the white crystals that are the explosive to develop.” The whole process, which can take between 12 and 36 hours, is “very dangerous, even in a lab, and can lead to premature detonation,” said Lt. Col. Wylde.

…”The idea that these people could sit in the plane toilet and simply mix together these normal household fluids to create a high explosive capable of blowing up the entire aircraft is untenable,” said Lt. Col. Wylde, who was trained as an ammunition technical officer responsible for terrorist bomb disposal at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Sandhurst.

…If there was a conspiracy, he added, “It did not involve manufacturing the explosives in the loo,” as this simply “could not have worked.” The process would be quickly and easily detected. The fumes of the chemicals in the toilet “would be smelt by anybody in the area.” They would also inevitably “cause the alarms in the toilet and in the air change system in the aircraft to be triggered. The pilot has the ability to dump all the air from an aircraft as a fire-fighting measure, leaving people to use oxygen masks. All this means the planned attack would be detected long before the queues outside the loo had grown to enormous lengths.”

Sources: August terror plot is a ‘fiction’ underscoring police failures:

By Nafeez Ahmed
Published: Monday September 18, 2006

If Mr. Conservatard were in the Bushtard administration and paid to have a script like this written, he would be pretty upset with the final product. It seems that the least that Bush Co. should get, when spending hard earned American tax payer money on a project like this, would be a terrorist movie script based on a plausible scenario. The least the authors should have done would be to do some sort of fact checking in order to make the plot seem somewhat realistic.

One can only hope that nobody will nominate such a poor screen play like “The London Liquid Explosive Terror Plot of 2006” for an Oscar this winter.

Mr. Conservatard wishes that he was in on the Bushtard fast track back in 2003. His pockets would have been lined with phat cash and he would be living on easy street now.

In an article in the Washington Post writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran states in his article called Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Early U.S. Missteps in the Green Zone covers how the Conservatard party was run in Iraq.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq’s oil revenue. It had more than 1,500 employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America’s viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its entire staff.

Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated — and ultimately hobbled — by administration ideologues.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran

So lets see if Mr. Conservatard can get this straight. It was not what you knew but who you knew that determined if you were going to help rebuild the nation that we just “liberated” at gunpoint. The Bushtard government put its best foot forward towards helping the newly shattered Iraqi people recover from their oppression under the Hussein regime. Bush Co. sent its most loyal slaves to guide the Iraqi people towards a new democratic nation. It’s a wonder t hat the Coalition Provisional Authority was able to only misplace 8.8 billion dollars of American Tax payer money.

Perhaps all of the violence in Iraq is akin to an Iraqi national thank you note to the Bushtards. Something on the order of “Thanks, but no thanks you friggin’ Bushtards. With friends like you, who need enemies?”