Skip to main content

A war criminal gets his own library and museum?

 




It is hard not to choke on the news that the Americans have just dedicated the George W Bush Library and Museum.    A library to someone who could hardly string a sentence together ?- let alone being a "war criminal", together with his cronies Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and John Howard, responsible for the Iraq War.

"It may be tough to keep food down today with the opening of the $250 million "temple to prevarication and ruin" that is the Bush Library and Museum - for many an event akin to pouring battery acid into still-open wounds - and the fawning coverage of a "courtier press." (It's hard to know who is most repellent in the ABC interview where a blandly smiling Dubya tells an infuriatingly ingenuous Diane Sawyer how comfortable hs is thanks with his decision to destroy Iraq.) See the Defending Freedom Table! The Ground Zero bullhorn! The video games representing the tough choices facing the great decider: Torture now or later? News of protests here, and, if you can stand it, wry livestream coverage from The Guardian. Charles Pierce, who can barely contain his rage, is best on a wholly dishonorable legacy, the current efforts "to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage it brought upon itself by electing, and then re-electing, a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched," and the "monstrous public lie" that is today's event.

"No, he doesn't deserve the day. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis who don't get today."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?

Intelligence agencies just can't help themselves

It is insidious and becoming increasingly widespread. Intelligence agencies in countries around the world, in effect, snooping on private exchanges between people not accussed of anything - other than simply using the internet or their mobile phone. The Age newspaper, in Australia, reports on how that country's intelligence operatives now want to widen their powers. It's all a slippery and dangerous slope! The telephone and internet data of every Australian would be retained for up to two years and intelligence agencies would be given increased access to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter under new proposals from Australia's intelligence community. Revealed in a discussion paper released by the Attorney-General's Department, the more than 40 proposals form a massive ambit claim from the intelligence agencies. If passed, they would be the most significant expansion of the Australian intelligence community's powers since the Howard-era reform...