CBS News helps the Bushies find their consciences

By D. Grant Haynes

May 8, 2004

The sudden feigned moral outrage, shock and indignation about revelations of POW abuse at Abu Ghraid prison in Iraq on the part of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other criminal elements of the present American administration is a bit difficult to accept.

More to the point, it is unadulterated, hypocritical caca del toro.

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others knew that Islamic soldiers and civilians were being abused by Americans from the opening volley of Bush's so-called "war on terrorism" with the Afghan campaign in the fall of 2001.

Human rights organizations--the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and others--have been warning of ongoing and widespread abuses at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at detention facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq for more than two years now.

But until a major America corporate media outlet--CBS News--finally elected for whatever reason or reasons to break their silence with the Abu Ghraid prison abuse scandal on April 28, members of the Bush administration, as well as the dumbed down, flag-waving American couch potatoes to whom they play, were happily content to permit the unspeakable to continue behind closed doors in the name of the so-called "war on terrorism".

A case in point.

In November 2001 more than 3,000 Taliban POW's suffered agonizing deaths by suffocation in sealed garbage containers at the hands of Northern Alliance soldiers with American Special Forces advisers present and fully aware of what was occurring.

This terrible breach of the Geneva Conventions and of all international law was documented and has since been exhaustively reported by the "alternative" media and various humanitarian organizations.

But the mainstream American media played the incident down or ignored it entirely so it did not exist in the minds of blindered Americans, the vast majority of whom get their news from CBS, CNN, Fox News, and other compliant corporate media outlets that usually take their cues from Pentagon briefing officers.

See the following Democracy Now! link to become familiar with the so-called "Convoy of Death" in Afghanistan in November 2001.

Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death

No, my fellow Americans, POW abuse is nothing new or shocking to the Bush administration, regardless of how many crocodile tears and apologies they muster about the Abu Ghraid scandal in the course of their election year posturing.

The aberrant Bush administration is now reaping the whirlwind after three years of virulent Islamophobic propagandizing. This sick nation of pseudo-Christian hypocrites made those soldiers into what they were at Abu Ghraib prison.

Tacit approval for dehumanizing Iraqis was built into a propaganda system to which the military and hundreds of millions of other unthinking Americans have been exposed endlessly since 911.

In truth, it is time for America to get out of Iraq.

Lyndon Johnson had his Tet Offensive and My Lai Massacre in 1968--events which, arguably, spelled the beginning of the end for American intervention in Vietnam, though tens of thousands more Americans and millions of Southeast Asians were still to die.

George W. Bush has now had his Abu Ghraid POW torture disclosures, his Falluja and Najaf standoffs, and an unprecedented number of casualties in the month of April just ended. May has begun on an equally bloody note.

The handwriting is on the wall.

It is time to for Bush to admit that he and his fellow neocon megalomaniacs were wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally and under false pretense.

America should leave that tortured nation as soon as possible to prevent the loss of thousands more lives on both sides for no legitimate reason at all.

Enough is enough.

Is it not altogether fitting and proper--a matchelss stroke of poetic justice--that something as innocuous as the personal digital camera--a symbol of the same American technological prowess and prosperity that caused the Bush administration to assume the illegal invasion of Iraq to be a piece of cake that no earthly power could prevent--has provided graphically damning evidence of the immorality and horror of that occupation and has brought its arrogant perpetrators to their knees?

Deity does indeed move in mysterious ways, His or Her wonders to perform.

 

phrase jack

America should leave that tortured [ and poisoned ] nation as soon as possible [ and finance reparations, repair and unqualified assistance ] to prevent the loss of thousands more lives[, possibly a war involving Israeli nuclear weapons with horrendous casualties] on both sides for no legitimate reason at all.