Another rat hiding in the bushes

The Disappearance of George P. Bush

By Linda Milazzo

Created 2006-12-16 12:36

It was the year 2000. The new millennium. It featured a rising new star from a prominent American family. His name was George. George P. Remember George P.? The incessantly publicized and promoted son of Florida's Governor Bush? The most dominant face of George W. Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign?

George P. was everywhere. Enticing the wealthy. Hugging the poor. Kissing elderly ladies, winning the hearts of adoring young girls. George P. was the bait. The lure. And America was his catch of the day. In our multi-cultural nation, this blended prince encompassed the best of America's two prominent landscapes: the ever-growing Latino population and the doggedly dominant Anglo. The half that was Anglo spanned generations of wealth and power. The half that was Latin softened his ego, making his combination just "right."

The media couldn't get enough of George P. He was the "fourth-coming." The likely successor to the mantle of the multi-generational dynasty whose fortune had amassed in unorthodox ways. Of course the unorthodox ways were of no interest to the press, whose sole focus was on the contentious election for the first President of the new millennium. The 2000 Presidential election was the nation's most divisive in history. It tore at the fabric of its democracy, tarnished the Supreme Court, and damaged the electoral system for decades, if not centuries to come.

Still it made a hit out of George P. Bush. For a couple years he was on his way to becoming the family's biggest star. But when Uncle W. took the nation to war, except for a carefully toned down appearance in the election of 2004, and some attention when he got married, George P. was neatly hidden from sight. He had to be. If he remained visible the questions would arise. Why isn't George P. serving in Iraq? George P.'s young enough. If he's a patriot, why doesn't he volunteer for the war?

Legitimate questions. So legitimate that the entire brood of military-age Bush grandchildren and cousins are no where to be found. They are hidden. Kept under wraps lest the question of their patriotism be decried. Except of course, First Twins Jenna and Barbara, whose sometime errant behavior throws them back in the public eye.

Certainly the military absences of Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes, Perles, Coulters, Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys, Crystals, Feiths, Ashcrofts, etc., are no news to those who pay attention. But it was particularly telling today as I watched Donald Rumsfeld's long goodbye. As I listened to his words and to the words of those who paid tribute at his farewell 'celebration' as Secretary of Defense.

I watched as Mr. Rumsfeld read from his speech, and I lamented the fact that he couldn't ad-lib a few simple lines about the families of the fallen. He was typically staccato and emotionless as he read the few short sentences about the sacrifices they had made. I couldn't imagine for a second, with the sad exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, any leaders who would have NEEDED to read these words. I couldn't imagine for a second why these words, if they were true, weren't burnt into the consciousness of Mr. Rumsfeld. I couldn't understand how it could be that these sentiments weren't crystal clear to him, and so deeply a part of his psyche, that no paper should be needed. But that wasn't the case...

These were the words Donald Rumsfeld NEEDED to read:

"As I end my time here some ask what will I remember. Well, I will remember all those courageous folks that I've met deployed in the field. Those in the military hospitals that we visited. And I will remember the fallen. And I will particularly remember their families (TURNING PAGE) from whom I have drawn inspiration."

These are the words Mr. Rumsfeld NEEDED to read. They came at the very end of his speech where it would have been the most simple, if the words were truly heartfelt, to put aside his papers and speak from his heart. His heart????

A further observation at today's ceremony was the absence, or so it appeared, of Mr. Rumsfeld's own military-age grandchild.

To be honest, I'm not proposing that Mr. Rumsfeld's grandchild or anyone else's child should serve in this war because I passionately oppose it. However, Mr. Rumsfeld does not. Mr. Rumsfeld has advocated that other people's children and grandchildren fight in this war, and he has ordered their deployment to do so. Therefore I am compelled to remind Mr. Rumsfeld of the words he spoke on March 23, 2002 in an interview for "Time For Kids" with twelve-year-old "TFK" reporter, Alexandra Tatarsky.

Rumsfeld said, "Will young people end up in the armed services? I hope so! We have wonderful young men and women serving their country with great dedication and courage and pride. I sure hope one of my grandchildren will want to serve!" (http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,220114,00.html [1])

Well, Mr. Rumsfeld, your grandchild was too young to serve in 2002 when you gave that interview, but that grandchild is old enough to serve today. So I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld: Do you really hope your grandchild will serve in this war? Have you actually suggested to your own child that her child should enlist in the military and serve?

Honestly, Mr. Rumsfeld, I doubt that you have!

One final note:. Recently, Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb, a man I deeply respect, had a short conversation with George W. Bush. I would like to offer MY VERSION of how that conversation might have gone:

G.W. Bush: How's your boy?

Sen. Webb: He's in harms way, Mr. Bush. How are your girls?

G.W. Bush: (Silence)

###

Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. Her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and domestic and international journals. She's a member of CodePink Women For Peace and Progressive Democrats of America. Over the past three decades Linda has divided her time between the entertainment industry, community projects and education. A political and social activist since the Vietnam War, Linda attributes her revitalized-fully-engaged-intense-head-on-non-stop-political activism to the UNFORTUNATE EXISTENCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH and her disgust with greed-ridden American imperialism, environmental atrocities, egregious war, nuclear proliferation, lying leaders, and global tyranny!

---

Source URL:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/16425

Links:
[1] http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,220114,00.html

Beyond Repair

Americans Have No Idea How Bad It Is

Iraq is Beyond Repair

By PATRICK COCKBURN
December 13, 2006

During the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century, eunuchs at the court of the Chinese emperor had the problem of informing him of the repeated and humiliating defeat of his armies. They dealt with their delicate task by simply telling the emperor that his forces had already won or were about to win victories on all fronts.

For three and a half years White House officials have dealt with bad news from Iraq in similar fashion. Journalists were repeatedly accused by the US administration of not reporting political and military progress on the ground. Information about the failure of the US venture was ignored or suppressed.

Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, "a careful review of the reports ... brought to light 1,100 acts of violence".

The 10-fold reduction in the number of acts of violence officially noted was achieved by not reporting the murder of an Iraqi, or roadside bomb, rocket or mortar attacks aimed at US troops that failed to inflict casualties. I remember visiting a unit of US combat engineers camped outside Fallujah in January 2004 who told me that they had stopped reporting insurgent attacks on themselves unless they suffered losses as commanders wanted to hear only that the number of attacks was going down. As I was drove away, a sergeant begged us not to attribute what he had said: "If you do I am in real trouble."

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was "largely unchallenged" in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush's response was: "What is he, some kind of a defeatist?" A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: "It's robust, it's well led, it's diverse." According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: "Is this guy a Democrat?"

The query is perhaps key to Mr Bush's priorities. The overriding political purpose of the US administration in invading Iraq was to retain power at home. It would do so by portraying Mr Bush as "the security president", manipulating and exaggerating the terrorist threat at home and purporting to combat it abroad. It would win cheap military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would hold "khaki" elections in which Democrats could be portrayed as unpatriotic poltroons.

The strategy worked - until November's mid-term elections. Mr Bush was victorious by presenting a false picture of Iraq. It is this that has been exposed as a fraud by the Iraq Study Group.

Long-maintained myths tumble. For instance, the standard stump speech by Mr Bush or Tony Blair since the start of the insurgency has been to emphasise the leading role of al-Qa'ida in Iraq and international terrorism. But the group's report declares "al-Qa'ida is responsible for a small portion of violence", adding that it is now largely Iraqi-run. Foreign fighters, their presence so often trumpeted by the White House and Downing Street, are estimated to number only 1,300 men in Iraq. As for building up the Iraqi army, the training of which is meant to be the centrepiece of US and British policy, the report says that half the 10 planned divisions are made up of soldiers who will serve only in areas dominated by their own community. And as for the army as a whole, it is uncertain "they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda".

Given this realism it is sad that its authors, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, share one great misconception with Mr Bush and Mr Blair. This is about the acceptability of any foreign troops in Iraq. Supposedly US combat troops will be withdrawn and redeployed as a stiffening or reinforcement to Iraqi military units. They will form quick-reaction forces able to intervene in moments of crisis.

"This simply won't work," one former Iraqi Interior Ministry official told me. "Iraqis who work with Americans are regarded as tainted by their families. Often our soldiers have to deny their contact with Americans to their own wives. Sometimes they balance their American connections by making contact with the insurgents at the same time."

Mr Bush and Mr Blair have always refused to take on board the simple unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis, though US and British military commanders have explained that it is the main fuel for the insurgency. The Baker-Hamilton report notes dryly that opinion polls show that 61 per cent of Iraqis favour armed attacks on US forces. Given the Kurds overwhelmingly support the US presence, this means three-quarters of all Arabs want military action against US soldiers.

The other great flaw in the report is to imply that Iraqis can be brought back together again. The reality is that the country has already broken apart. In Baghdad, Sunnis no longer dare to visit the main mortuary to look for murdered relatives because it is under Shia control and they might be killed themselves. The future of Iraq may well be a confederation rather than a federation, with Shia, Sunni and Kurd each enjoying autonomy close to independence.

There are certain points on which the White House and the authors of the report are dangerously at one. This is that the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki can be bullied into trying to crush the militias (this usually means just one anti-American militia, the Mehdi Army), or will bolt from the Shia alliance. In the eyes of many Iraqis this would simply confirm its status as a US pawn. As for talking with Iran and Syria or acting on the Israel-Palestinian crisis it is surely impossible for Mr Bush to retreat so openly from his policies of the past three years, however disastrous their outcome.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', to be published by Verso in October.

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Reba in Paris

Photojournalist Killed in Mosul One of more than 130 media workers killed since beginning of Iraq war By THOMAS WAGNER ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER An undated photograph shows Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, 35, a television cameraman working for the Associated Press who was shot to death by insurgents while covering clashes Tuesday Dec. 12, 2006 in the northern city of Mosul. Lutfallah had been employed by AP Television News as a cameraman in Mosul since 2005. He is survived by his wife, Alyaa Abdul-Karim Salim, a 6-year-old son and a daughter who was born this year. (AP Photo) BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A cameraman working for The Associated Press was shot to death by insurgents while covering clashes Tuesday in Mosul, police said. He was the second employee of the news cooperative killed in the northern city in less than two years. Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, 35, was having his car repaired in an industrial area in the eastern part of the city at about 10:30 a.m. when insurgents and police began fighting nearby and he rushed to cover the clash, police Brig. Abdul-Karim Ahmed Khalaf said. Insurgents spotted him filming, approached him and shot him to death, Khalaf said, citing an initial report. Lutfallah had not reported any prior threats against him. Lutfallah had been employed by AP Television News as a cameraman in Mosul since 2005. He is survived by his wife, Alyaa Abdul-Karim Salim, a 6-year-old son, Yusof, and an infant daughter, Rafa. "Our hearts go out to Aswan's family and his Iraqi AP colleagues," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley. "The murder of yet another journalist underscores the particular dangers of this conflict and the sacrifices of those committed to reporting the story." A funeral in Mosul was planned for Wednesday. In five shootings in other neighborhoods of the city on Tuesday, gunmen killed four civilians and a policeman, said police Brig. Abdul Kerim al-Jubouri. Violence in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, appears to have decreased since November 2004, when the city's entire 5,500-member police force deserted during a major insurgent uprising. But Iraqi security forces still struggle to maintain order in the city of Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds. On April 23, 2005, cameraman Saleh Ibrahim was killed after an explosion in Mosul. He was a father of five in his early 30s. AP photographer Mohammed Ibrahim was wounded. The circumstances of the death and injury are still unclear. Lutfallah was the third AP employee killed in the Iraq war. In 2004, Ismail Taher Mohsin, a driver, was ambushed by gunmen and killed near his home in Baghdad. Lutfallah's death brings to 29 the number those who have lost their lives on assignments for the AP since the news cooperative was founded in 1846. Before Tuesday's killing, Reporters Without Borders had recorded at least 93 journalists killed in Iraq since the war started nearly four years ago. Forty-five media assistants also have been killed, according to the Paris-based advocacy group. The Committee to Protect Journalists had put the figure at 89 journalists and 37 media support workers killed in Iraq. http://preview.tinyurl.com/y2mf5b Tuesday, December 12, 2006 · Last updated 1:17 p.m. PT

Uhm, why are all followers of any religion "the same"?

Why are Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests include deniers of the genocide? Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state.

A handful of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran's controversial conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews - not because they deny the Holocaust but because they object to using it as justification for the existence of Israel.

With their distinctive hats, beards and side locks, these men may, to the untrained eye, look like any other Orthodox believers in Jerusalem or New York. But the Jews who went to Tehran are different.

Some of them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a group of a few thousand people which views Zionism - the movement to establish a Jewish national home or state in what was Palestine - as a "poison" threatening "true Jews".

A representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed "that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved".

In its place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be "a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries".

Neturei Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish religion.

The book of Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.

An opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust Manouchehr Mottaki Iranian foreign minister, describing the conference

But how does Neturei Karta and other Orthodox Jews such as Austria-based Rabbi Moishe Ayre Friedman justify attending such a controversial conference?

Rabbi Friedman told BBC Radio Four's PM programme that he was not in Tehran to debate whether the Holocaust happened or not, but to look at its lessons.

He says the Holocaust was being used to legitimise the suffering of other peoples and he wanted to break what he called a taboo on discussing it.

The main thing, he argued, was not Jewish suffering in the past but the use of the Holocaust as a "tool of commercial, military and media power".

In what many other Jews would consider the height of naivety, he commended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for wanting "a secured future for innocent Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere".

In his speech to the conference, Neturei Karta's Rabbi Cohen said there was no doubt about the Holocaust and it would be "a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way".

However, he also argued that the genocide had been divine will. "The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'.

"They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy."

Neturei Karta have been condemned by other Orthodox Jews as an extreme fringe movement while the Tehran conference has been denounced by the Israeli parliament.

http://tinyurl.com/y6ly4n