Arab Anger Over Bush's Failure to Apologize

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BEIRUT, Lebanon -- U.S. President George W. Bush said on Arabic TV he was "appalled" at abuses by U.S. prison guards in Iraq but ordinary Arabs have reacted with widespread anger after he failed to make a personal apology.

But Bush's comments failed to quell the furor of the prisoner abuse scandal, with many Arabs critical the president stopped short of apologizing.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/06/bush.arab.reax/index.html

Lawyer Souraya Machnouk said Bush's comments were unlikely to have an impact on hearts and minds in the Middle East.

"He can't pretty much do anything. It's a disaster for him and his polices in the Arab world and in Iraq, what happened in Iraq is contradicting to what he was preaching. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes," she told CNN.

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The really appallingly sad and frightening thing is that US citizens are probably going to reelect him.

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Bush no longer needs voters. All he needs is his buddies in the Supreme Court. Crying or Very sad

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"Bush no longer needs voters." John Webb

What he has is DieBold who's owner is a radical, right-winger and unapologetic Bush supporter.

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Bush is "appalled" alright. Appalled the military was caught.

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The real deal
Washington's hypocrisy over Iraq torture

By Bill Van Auken

Quote:

Forced to confront the catastrophic impact that the photographs of naked and hooded Iraqis being sexually abused and tortured by US troops has had in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, official Washington has feigned horror.

President Bush, speaking to the press in Michigan on Monday, said he was "shocked" by the photographs. "I was stunned by it all," declared Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, adding that actions taken against Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad were "un-American."

Who does he think he is kidding? Thanks to the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co., torture is as American as apple pie.

For more than two-and-a-half years, since "everything changed" on September 11, 2001, the US political establishment has fostered a public debate over the ethics of torture. Reams of articles have been published on the topic, and polls have been taken on whether terrorist suspects should be tortured. ABC's Ted Koppel devoted a televised "town hall" meeting to the subject, while Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz conducted a media tour to urge that torture be legally sanctioned, with courts issuing warrants to allow a practice banned by international law.

This campaign to inure the American public to government torture unfolded as the Bush administration set up a network of US-run concentration camps from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to the Baghram air base in Afghanistan, as well as in numerous "undisclosed locations." Individuals detained by the US military and the CIA have been confined in these overseas prisons precisely to evade any legal restrictions and judicial oversight over the way these detainees are treated and any necessity to prove their guilt. There is every reason to believe that what has been uncovered at Abu Ghraib?-and far worse?-is taking place at these installations as well.

US Army officials speaking to Reuters on Tuesday said that at least 25 detainees held by the US military have died in custody. It appears that some of these deaths were the result of torture. In one case, a civilian contractor killed a prisoner during interrogation at the Iraqi prison. Subject to neither military discipline nor Iraqi law, the mercenary faced no penalty whatsoever.

In addition to its own activities, Washington has developed a system of contracting out its torture through a procedure that is discreetly referred to as "rendering." Those detained by the US are rendered to regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Syria and other countries where local police torture them, often with US interrogators present.

This latest scandal over US torture has far-reaching historical precedents. The US has practiced torture and trained others in it for decades. In Vietnam, thousands held by the US died under torture and in the infamous "tiger cages." In Latin America, US-backed dictatorships routinely tortured political prisoners. Most of those doing the torturing were trained by US personnel. The infamous SAVAK secret police of the Iranian Shah was likewise a creation of the CIA. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, US training materials, including a manual on how to torture women, were discovered in the CIA's headquarters.

These grisly practices continued in the dirty wars waged by Washington in Central America in the 1980s. As US ambassador to Honduras during that period, John Negroponte was intimately connected with contra terrorism against Nicaragua and death squad murders in Honduras. It is hardly an accident that Negroponte has now been named as the US ambassador/proconsul to Iraq.

The man now serving as the US advisor to the Iraqi security forces, James Steele, is likewise a veteran of that period. He was the highest ranking US military officer in El Salvador in 1985, a year in which the US-backed regime killed more than 1,500 civilians and tortured many thousands more. Like Negroponte, he was implicated in the illegal conspiracy to arm and finance the contras.

With such elements directing operations in Iraq, the attempt to attribute the torture at Abu Ghraib merely to a half-dozen reservists and a roughly equal number of military intelligence officers amounts to a patent cover-up.

There is no doubt that those who amused themselves with sexual torture at Abu Ghraib are both backward and depraved. Their actions also reflect a far wider demoralization within the entire US occupation force, which is increasingly wondering why it is in Iraq. There is something about the torture in Iraq that is all too familiar. Similar acts take place in the vast US prison complex or the backrooms of police stationhouses. Imperialism breeds such brutality, not just abroad but in the US itself.

The fact remains, however, that these sadistic actions were encouraged by elements who bear far greater responsibility for the illegal war against Iraq.

The top officer facing administrative discipline, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who oversaw the prison, has insisted that the commander of all land forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, should also be held accountable. The decision to turn the prison over to military intelligence and to use whatever means necessary to pry out information on the growing resistance was taken at the top of the military command. Military intelligence, with command authorization, then instructed the reservists to prepare their interrogation subjects through acts of brutality and sadism such as those shown in the photographs.

Former Iraqi human rights minister Abdel Basset Turki, meanwhile, revealed that he informed Paul Bremer, the civilian chief of the occupation, about torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners last November. "He listened but there was no answer," said Turki, who was denied permission to visit the prisons. He has since resigned from the puppet government in protest over the slaughter of civilians in the US military sieges against Fallujah and Najaf.

Thus, both the military and the civilian heads of the US occupation are implicated in this affair, but responsibility hardly stops there. Going up the chain of command still further, one reaches those who are politically responsible for these heinous acts.

The Wall Street Journal, whose right-wing views correspond closely to those of the administration, published an editorial Monday concluding that "the US has probably gone too easy on most arrested Iraqis."

This is the same message that has filtered down from the White House to the lowest ranking reservist. The invasion of Iraq has been cast as part of a global "war on terrorism" in which you are either "with us or with the terrorists."

With the great majority of Iraqis opposing the occupation of their country and many thousands of them taking up armed resistance, demoralized and disoriented troops are encouraged to see a nation of terrorists against whom no violence is too terrible. The inevitable result is mass brutality fueled in part by the racial contempt that is encouraged among the occupiers for the occupied in every colonial war.

The result of these methods has been an explosive growth of support for the struggle to defeat the US occupation. In a telling interview by Time Asia, Jumpei Yasuda, a journalist and one of the Japanese taken hostage earlier this month, described a conversation with one of the fighters holding him:

"The man who pointed his gun at me told me he was walking on the sidewalk and was arrested by the GIs when he wouldn't answer their questions. He said he was imprisoned for almost a month and regularly beaten up. One day, he said, he was taken to a private room and sexually assaulted. He asked me what I would have done if I were him, and I had no answer."

There has been no outraged reaction from the Democratic Party?-including its presidential candidate John Kerry?-to the torture revelations. Instead, leading Democrats have reiterated their commitment to continuing the occupation that gave rise to these crimes.

The Democrats' sole concern is that the release of the photographs further undermines this crisis-ridden military operation. Like the Republicans, they are concerned not about ending the brutality against the Iraqi people, but rather with subduing the Iraqis in order to seize oil resources and establish US hegemony in the region and globally.

There is no reason to believe that the Army, the Congress or any other part of the US government will carry out a serious investigation into the use of torture in Iraq. Every section of the ruling establishment is implicated in this war and, therefore, in all of the atrocities it has spawned. A concerted attempt is already under way to bury the issue as quickly as possible, limiting responsibility to those at the bottom of the chain of command who were caught executing the orders and policies devised in Washington.

The hideous practices at Abu Ghraib are not a question of mistakes, poor training or inadequate discipline. They are criminal acts that flow inevitably from a greater crime, the conspiracy to invade and conquer Iraq.

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Shallow
Bush on Arabic-language television: old lies and glaring contradictions

By David Walsh

President George W. Bush made two appearances on Arabic-language television Wednesday, in a clumsy attempt at "damage control" in the wake of the outrage provoked by the exposure of the US torture of Iraqi prisoners.Bush gave brief interviews to the Al Hurra satellite station, the American government propaganda outlet, and the widely followed Al Arabiya, the network based in Dubai. The administration snubbed Al Jazeera, the most popular station in the Middle East, because of its relatively objective, i.e., critical, reporting of the US war effort in Iraq.

The task facing Bush's handlers was a daunting, indeed impossible one. Their aim was to transform the president, whose record of either taking sadistic pleasure in violence and death (from the execution of condemned prisoners in Texas to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan) is lengthy and well-known one, into a sensitive, caring soul. Former president Bill Clinton was much more effective at pulling a long face when necessary.

Bush simply reeks of insincerity.In his interviews Bush repeated the lies and sophistries associated with the US intervention in Iraq. He told Al Hurra that America "sent troops into Iraq to promote freedom." In both interviews Bush claimed that the US goal was a peaceful, democratic, self-governing Iraq. In his Al Arabiyah interview, the president commented: "We want to help Iraq. We've made a commitment. And the United States will keep that commitment because we believe in freedom and we believe the people of Iraq want to be free."Masses of people around the world saw through this argument before the US invasion of Iraq last March, and properly identified the campaign against the Middle Eastern nation as a colonial war of plunder aimed at its natural resources, and countless millions more now understand this.

The photographs of American military atrocities carried out against helpless Iraqis, many of them simply caught up in random sweeps, have helped clarify many in the US and elsewhere about the real character of this conflict. At one point Bush admitted that the impact in the Middle East of the images of military abuse would be "terrible."In his interviews the US president sounded one of the recurring themes of administration officials in response to the current torture scandal, that the "abhorrent" practices carried out in Abu Ghraib prison "don't represent America." Bush told Al Hurra that the abuses "do not reflect the hearts of the American people. The American people are just as appalled at what they have seen on TV as the Iraqi citizens have [been]."Of course there is a kernel of truth here.

The torture and sadism do not reflect the heart and soul of the American people as a whole. Working people are appalled. But there are two Americas. While such savagery would be horrifying to most US citizens, it is certainly not out of place in George W. Bush's America: the America of wealth, corruption and criminality. Brutality and repression are essential ingredients of Bush's America, directed against the poor, the working class and political opposition in the US and against peoples abroad who are perceived as obstructing Washington's geopolitical ambitions.The torture of suspects has become quasi-official US policy since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks provided the Bush administration the opportunity to go on the offensive in its so-called "war on terror."In the wake of September 11, the media began a widespread discussion about the pros and cons of torturing detainees.

Newsweek magazine carried a piece by Jonathan Alter entitled, "Time To Think About Torture." Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel featured a segment which anchorman Shepard Smith introduced by asking, "Should law enforcement be allowed to do anything, even terrible things, to make suspects spill the beans?" On CNN's "Crossfire" program, right-winger Tucker Carlson suggested that under certain circumstances, torture "may be the lesser of two evils."US law enforcement agencies rounded up hundreds of men from Middle Eastern countries and routinely abused and beat them. A Justice Department report issued last summer revealed "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse," particularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, and the Passaic County jail in Paterson, New Jersey. Detainees in Brooklyn?-none of whom were ever charged with terrorism?-asserted that they had their heads slammed against walls, often before guards videotaped their statements.

Some charged they were dragged by their handcuffs and ankle chains, and told, "You will feel pain." Others complained that their arms, hands, wrists and fingers were twisted.In the aftermath of the US conquest of Afghanistan Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave American and Afghan forces the green light to capture or kill Taliban and others caught up in the fighting and generally do whatever they liked to "people who have done terrible things." The massacre of hundreds of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif was one of the direct consequences of US policy.

What is Guantanamo Bay if not a concentration camp at which hundreds of internees, none of whom have been accused of a crime in a court of law, face inhuman conditions on a daily basis?Those carrying out the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib have made it clear that they were following orders from higher-ups to "soften up" and break the prisoners. The actions at the Baghdad prison are not an aberration, they have become the norm for the US government and military.Indeed, after confidently telling the Al Arabiya interviewer that the horrors at the Baghdad prison are the "actions of a few people,"

Bush only seconds later declared, "I want to know the full extent of the operations in Iraq, the prison operations. We want to make sure that if there is a systemic problem?-in other words, if there's a problem system-wide?-that we stop the practices."To admit this possibility is damning enough. The "systemic" abuse of thousands of Iraqi prisoners (reported on by US Major General Antonio Taguba in his 53-page report, which the Bush administration sat on for months) by itself makes a mockery of the claims that the US mission is to bring freedom and democracy to that nation.Bush claimed in his Al Hurra interview that the US was a democracy and that "everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made.

But in a democracy as well those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice." American government conduct "stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice. Under his regime there were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice." That the US political system has not yet descended to the level of a brutal police-state regime trying to keep the lid on a country beset by volatile social and ethnic conflicts is a small mercy indeed!Bush told Al Arabiyah, "A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation. A dictator wouldn't admit reforms needed to be done."

In fact, his administration did everything in its power to prevent the publication of the photographs and the dissemination of the story about the torture of the Iraqi prisoners. Even when CBS television had gotten hold of the material, the US military applied pressure on the network to kill the story. In the end, it was simply too explosive and widely known to conceal.Elements in the Bush administration?-the most conspiratorial and criminal in US history?-have no doubt drawn the lesson that further and tighter restrictions, resembling precisely those that exist under police-state dictatorships, must be placed on the American media to prevent a repetition of this damaging episode.

Bush claimed that "People will be brought to justice." Who? A handful of military prison guards, made scapegoats for the criminality of the entire enterprise? In reality, the "chain of command" leads from Abu Ghraib prison to the military high command in Iraq, including General Ricardo Sanchez, all the way to the Pentagon and the White House, to Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and Bush himself. These are the genuinely responsible parties.When asked by the Al Hurra interviewer whether he retained confidence in Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Bush gave less than a wholehearted endorsement. If the transcribed text is correct, Bush said, "Oh, of course I have some confidence in the secretary of defense."

The Bush administration's Iraq policy has always had an unreal element about it. Administration officials believed they could simply say anything, make up anything, claim anything, and get away with it. The policy is now in shambles, but the mindset of the cabal in Washington has not changed. How else to explain Bush's comment, absurd on the face of it, that "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destablilize their country"?

The Al Arabiyah interviewer asked Bush, with intended irony or not, whether the US was planning more action "against some other countries" to make democracy "flourish" in the Middle East, such as Syria. The president became quite defensive, claiming that there were no such plans and that "Iraq was a unique situation because Saddam Hussein had constantly defied the world and had threatened his neighbors, had used weapons of mass destruction, had terrorist ties, had torture chambers inside his country, had mass graves."

Leaving aside the lies and half-truths in Bush's reply?-after all, the US was an ally of Hussein during the years he carried out many of his crimes and no ties to terrorists were ever proved?-it may very well be that the resident of the White House, neither morally or intellectually prepared for setbacks and crises, has been shaken by the disaster unfolding in Iraq. For Bush and American imperialism, however, there is no going back. The US ruling elite has set out on a course of world domination and it will respond to the exposure of its crimes by committing far greater crimes.

http://wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/bush-m06.shtml

*The pathetic part is that W actually believes his own hype. This is a dry drunk with diminished mental capacities,who has a simplistic world view of an 8 yr., old barely literate. The reason that he is popular with many Americans is that those that still support this dolt are on par with him or below his level.

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Deecups36 wrote:

Bush is "appalled" alright. Appalled the military was caught.

Ditto!

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It looks like Lord Bush has apologized for US military atrocities, but he leveled his apology at the King of Jordan!

What the hell is going on here?

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Arab Anger Over Bush's Failure to Apologize

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