Observers may wonder how an American president such as George Bush, who has had to face one crisis after another as he seeks re-election, could hold on to an unsuccessful, reckless and extremist secretary of defense such as Donald Rumsfeld. And even more amazing that Bush would go to the Pentagon to visit the secretary, declare his support for him and praise his work?
Is it loyalty or machismo? Or is it political calculation? Simply put, if Rumsfeld goes down, so will Bush.
It is naïve to speak of loyalty and machismo in the modern political world because they are indeed rare these days. The reason for Bush’s visit is made clear by a report on NBC Nightly News on May 10. On the program, the American reporter, Andrea Mitchell, confirmed that the administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell had repeatedly warned both the president and the Pentagon about the consequences of criminal torture in American prisons in Iraq and that both Bush and Rumsfeld had ignored the warnings.
What else? The Associated Press in a report from the Geneva headquarters of the Red Cross on May 10 said that NATO intelligence officers had confirmed that between 70-90 percent of Iraqi prisoners had been wrongfully arrested. A report by the US news agency confirmed through high-level officials in the Red Cross, that the organization had warned the American forces a number of times, both orally and in writing, of torture and its consequences. Officials at the Red Cross confirmed that the torture was not an isolated act or two by a few as Bush and Rumsfeld have said but the methodical carrying out of a system put in place by military intelligence and known to all.
Everyone knows and most regrettably, everyone is lying to their people, legislative authorities and to the world at large. Their talk of American principles and high morals and the horror they feel upon hearing the news of the tortures — for the first time! — are pure lies and hypocrisy. We do not deny the principles and high morals on which the United States was built nor the mass of the American people’s commitment to those principles. Bush and Rumsfeld’s talk of morals and principles, however, are cheap lies.
They have lied over and over in their war on terrorism, their invasion of Afghanistan and in the occupation of Iraq — all on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. They lied in many of their their accusations about Islamic charitable organizations around the world. These liars are the same ones who publish projects and announce that they will rebuild homes, clean up societies, purify school curricula and teach us all about liberty and human rights. The very liberty and human rights they are abusing! Perhaps they will also give us lessons in lying, trickery and deception in which they have become adept. We do not blame them for so much trickery and deception — we blame our own who have been promoting these Zionist-American projects even more than the Americans themselves and have become more strict and harsh toward their own people, skeptical of our history and violating its principles more than ours worst enemies. ([email protected])
