Executive Interrogation, Right?

The Emperor Boy George floated out his executive order governing CIA interrogation techniques and their relationship, or not, to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on a Friday afternoon (July 20, but what's important is the choice of Friday), just in time for the Sargasso Sea of journalism--the start of the weekend. His timing proved all the more diabolical--although, of course, he couldn't have known, could he--when a three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C., presided over by Douglas Ginsburg, who some will remember as the thoroughly capable Supreme Court nominee of Bill Clinton forced to withdraw after it became known that he had on more than one occasion been familiar with reefer, thumped the Bushies on their extra-legal treatment of Guantanamo detainees.

Human Rights groups complained about the Bush order on interrogation for good reason. It purports to bring the CIA into line with the Geneva accords in terms of the techniques it can use, even while it leaves rather large lacuna through which all manner of scum can ooze before hardening into instruments of torture and abuse. Sure enough, by Saturday night, the initial cautiously favorable reports on the Bushbucker's order had turned sour, as its limitations became clear. Bushbucker continues to flaunt his contempt for the constitution, international law, and human rights without consequence.

He also buried the controversy over torture by undergoing a colonoscopy on a Saturday, which necessitated relinquishing power to Cheney, while he was anesthetized. That gave all right thinking people reason to be very concerned. Then, when he came up from under, it seems the Emperor Boy George immediately commenced rattling his official souvenir Crusader armor and sword at the border area of Pakistan where he has allowed the Osama to operate unimpeded for the past several years. The Emperor Boy as also begun saying and instructed his minions to say as well that the sole mission of the U.S. in Iraq is to slay al Qaeda in Iraq--nice as long as you forget the Sunnis and Shiites we're also fighting there.

Doctors Without Borders, a fearless group, won't send people to central and southern Iraq because the situation is too insecure, meaning they would end up day. That must be the sea change in the security situation that the Emperor Boy George and his loyal handlers and enabler keep yammering on about, the improvement that makes it possible to concentrate full American firepower on the several handful of al Qaeda in Iraq. It is amazing and distressing to see true madness in power, the way in wallows publicly and brazenly in its own hypocrisy and perfidy, knowing that no one will rise up to take it down. Americans aren't the good guys in this one; they were thrown into an illegal, unjust war and told to behave brutally by a madman leading a servile congress and spineless military high command. It ain't Vietnam all over again. It's worse; it's Iraq/Afghanistan.

The new National Intelligence Estimate is out, with a parsimonious 7 pages of generalized pabulum, called a summary, available to the public--I got mine through the Washington Post. The news stories and analyses are continuing to appear every 10 minutes or so, and since I see no reason to provide links to material that changes as soon as it appears, I won't. Besides, the NIE is all one needs to see that the Bushies' War on Terriors is a total fiasco, a bust. Iraq is a disaster, which never had a place in the WoT, Afghanistan is Taliban, and the Osama has regrouped in the Pakistan's tribal regions with the the blessing of Musharraf and at least insofar as it supports him, the U.S. I write that knowing that Musharraf has spent the last few days bombarding the tribal areas as punishment for the slaughter at the Red Mosque last week and as a way to ingratiate himself with the Bushies, who need to look momentarily tough in order to deflect attention from the damning NIE. Damning NIE, indeed, as if one more document exposing the moral, intellectual, and tactical bankruptcy of the Bushies will have any impact at all. No one knows who the enemy is or why we are fighting in Iraq, for that matter. Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash lays out the depressing truth in today's Los Angeles Times, concluding with this lament: "Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster." The only way to climb from this cesspool is by simultaneously impeaching the Emperor Boy George and his Vice Dick. Later, they can be put in orange jumpsuits, hooded, duct-taped and hauled to the Hague for trial on war crimes and crimes against humanity.