unbelievable - can you show me a truth other that "I, George Walker Bush...."
No, seriously. Show me where they have lied. I want documented proof, not some columnists opinion.
Oh, here's a little rundown of it.
Not that I doubt you will discount them immediately as being unreliable sources, etc., but here ya go:
A top ten list:
http://www.bushlies.com/topten.php
Here's another one, with specifics:
http://www.house.gov/appropriations_democrats/caughtonfilm.htm
Here's a slightly dated one talking about lies leading up to the Iraq war:
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/07/22_lies.html
I suppose you will come back with the tired old 'he was decieved by our intelligence community' argument, in which case, he is a damn fool. That's an acceptable solution to me as well as to why I cannot accept their words at face value.
How about the refusal to admit who outed Palme?
How about Colin Powell telling the U.N. that Iraq had mobile wmd factories? Our own inspectors knew that wasn't true.
Either the people at the top lie, lie, and lie again, or they are idiots being fooled by the people beneath them. Either way, quality leadership is somewhat lacking in D.C. at the moment.
Cycloptichorn
I was serious, give me a truth.............
with all that the left has to work with, they still cannot find a single lie that Bush has told.
Oh, sure, there are plenty of instances of misleading statements, innuendo, half-truths, etc, but no lies. No "I did not have sexual relations with that man, Saddam hussein...". But, he is a politician. I darn good one too as he has yet to be caught in a lie.
In the future, perhaps you could refer to the President as something other than "liar"...
Sorry ass liar works..... But, your a typical right wing fascist blind follower and can't see anyway - I'm so sorry for you and your ilk :sad:
Have a nice day anyway
You see, you didn't actually respond to anything I said.
You discounted it all, but that's not the same thing. Give me actual responses to what I said, show how they are not lies, or concede the point.
Cycloptichorn
I read each link. I found no evidence of lies, so I found nothing to reply to. Your links are supercilious at best.
Mcg proves the adage that there is none so blind as he who will not see. Or you can't fill a glass with a hole in the bottom.
What am I blind to? The fact that the left doesn't like G.W.? Well, color me surprised!! The fact remains, he isn't a liar. He is a politician, and a rather good one at that.
Yeah, I don't think you actually read the pages. Just as I suspected you wouldn't. Here's a gem for ya, though:
That is a categorical lie. When you say things in order to garner public support, and then do something else, you were lying about it. No way for you to argue this one....
Cycloptichorn
So, now I am a liar as well?
That whole statement is bunk. (I read this statement and the other nine as well) Why is there a 9/11 commission? Why did Bush testify before the commission? Where is the lie in any of that jibber-jabber?
You seem to think that the american people are entitled to every secret that is known in the White House. Not only is that dangerous, but incredibly naive. The administration needs to be able to function. That means that they have secrets. That why we have classified documents and that's why we have organizations like the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.
The left's need to knwo everything possible is mind-numbingly disturbing. Why not let Osama take a guided tour through the white house and give him unfettered access to the Oval office?
Not every secret needs to be known. Quit appealing to extremes.
We have classified documents in order to protect national security, not to protect those in office who are approving policies that go against the moral fabric of what we stand for as Americans.
Keep on apologizing, though. I'm sure they are all great guys with nothing to hide.
Cycloptichorn
On edit: oh yeah. You're telling me that the Bush admin did NOT oppose certain aspects of the 9/11 commission, and was NOT reluctant to testify, did NOT refuse to testify publicly, and did NOT edit the crap out of the report? Because those things are neccessary for the public to find out the ENTIRE truth about the situation, which is what BUSH stated needed to happen. You can't have it both ways, man.
Fantasizing for a moment:
I would like to be in the mob that hauls Ashcroft out of the DOJ building and crucifies him, in order for him to become the martyr he prays to God every night to be.
He is THE most dangerous man in this administration. He makes Cheney look like a pretender.
I cannot wait until he runs for President. Now that is gonna be some fun.
Quote:There's no question what took place in that prison was horrible. But the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn't be judged on the actions of a . . . well, we shouldn't be judged on actions. It's our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn't mean it's something we would do.
The above is a small portion of Mark Danner's piece here...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17190
Such acts have been consistent throughout the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Danner lays out, to attribute such to 'the acts of a deranged few' is non-sensical and contrary to all the evidence. These acts are a consequence of policies and those policies the consequence of ideas held by the present administration.
Tortured definitions
Perhaps Ashcroft didn’t get
the memo about what U.S. stands for.
Come and sit with me for a moment. I am in a room, in a Middle Eastern country, and I am talking to a government official. He mentions the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison outside of Baghdad, and what this has done to America's image in his region. He smiles at what he says, for he is a man who appreciates irony. Of course, this same thing happens in his country, he says. Inwardly, I smile back, smug in my confidence that Abu Ghraib or no Abu Ghraib, America is a different sort of nation. It now seems I was a bit too smug.
The recent revelations that the Justice Department prepared memos parsing what is and what is not torture bring to mind regimes that I would rather not bring to mind, the torturers of the world, although they deny it and, to prove their lie, they produce copious laws against the practice.
Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the Senate the other day that the memos were only the scribblings of lawyers, and - most important - the President has not "directed or ordered" torture. In another administration, such an assurance would be enough for me, but given this one's cavalier approach to civil liberties, I have to note that "directed" or "ordered" is not the same as condoned. That's what I wonder about.
I wonder, too, why the Justice Department went through all the trouble to come up with definitions of torture. It's clear someone had torture in mind. The Defense Department and the CIA were looking for guidance.
If the CIA got its hands on a terrorist who it thought might have information about coming attacks, could it, say, torture the guy a little bit so he would cough up the information? In one of the memos leaked to The Washington Post, the Justice Department said yes, torture, but only a bit. "For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." This is a very odd - shall we say "tortured" - definition.
The Bush administration constantly reminds us that there's a war on. That's wrong. There are two. One is being fought by soldiers in combat and the other is being fought for the hearts and minds of people who are not yet our enemies. However badly the administration has botched the first war - where, oh where, is Osama Bin Laden? - it has done even worse with the second. It has jutted its chin to the world, appeared pugnacious and unilateralist, permitted the abuse of POWs and others at Abu Ghraib, and now toyed in some fashion with torture. The Bush administration has shamed us all, reducing us to the level of those governments who also have wonderful laws forbidding torture but condone it anyway.
It is commonly said that we are a nation of laws, not men. And we are. But beyond the laws, we are also a nation of men and women with a common ethic. Some things are not American. Torture, for damned sure, is not American.
That opinion is a fine summary of what I have been ruminating about, after watching Ashcroft's purple forked tongue flick nervously across his rubbery lips to catch the gelatinous drool oozing out continuously from his mouth.
And that was before he spoke.
To extend on au1929's source's postulate, and with the caveat that I am not a lawyer so I often hesitate before treading into explicitly legal grounds...
... there's something which has been bugging me for some time, so I'll just throw it out there. Maybe joefromchicago or jespah or some of the other legal eagles can clarify, correct, or reinforce.
In the recent Senate hearings, Rumsfeld kept trying to make a distinction between "abuse" of prisoners and "torture" of prisoners. In much of the subsequent commentary, it was as if people were interpreting this to be a matter of severity or degree. That is, if you "hurt someone a little bit" or "embarrass" them, we call that "abuse" as opposed to "hurting someone a lot", which we call "torture."
But that really isn't the conceptual or legal distinction between torture and abuse (and I'm not at all sure if "prisoner abuse" has a real legal definition). The distinction between torture and abuse is one of intent.
If I'm a prison guard and for no good reason I beat the crap out of a prisoner, then no matter what the severity of the beating I would not be guilty of "torture." If anyone cares and there happens to be videotape and the prisoner's lawyer gets his/her hands on it, I might find myself getting charged with assault.
What would make that beating torture is if I were doing it to elicit information. From my reading of the various statutes, treaties, etc., even fairly mild forms of "abuse" are considered to be torture, if the purpose of the activity is to elicit information.
There are a couple of reasons the United States takes (or at least we did until Bush was selected) such a strong legal stand against torture. The first is one people regularly discuss: the basic Geneva Convention principle which is in place to protect our own soldiers from the same treatment. The Golden Rule.
But aside from that it also gets at the heart of our entire system of justice: the right against self-incrimination, innocent until proven guilty, no cruel and unusual punishment.
Most prisoners in Abu Ghraib were innocent of anything and subsequently let go. Many prisoners in Guantanamo have been let go. I assume they were innocent too, although since they haven't been charged with anything it isn't clear what they were thought to have been guilty of in the first place.
Abusive cops and prison guards are common. And while the abuses can be as bad or worse as any of the scenes of torture we've seen, there's a key distinction -- the very concept of torture is anathema to our entire system of justice.
And there's another word that describes the men and women who performed acts of torture and photographed themselves with expressions of glee and passed them around like baseball cards and put them on screensavers:
Sadists.
Rumsfeld said, "Take the gloves off."
And keep in mind, Lindh was an American citizen.
This story provides a huge clue about what's happening down at our gulag in Cuba:
Quote:The Army confirmed (May 25) that a former military police officer was injured while posing as a prisoner during a training session at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last year.
But Maj. Laurie Arellano, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, said Spc. Sean Baker's medical discharge last month was not related to the head injury he received during training at the detention center, where the U.S. government is holding suspected terrorists. She declined to elaborate, citing medical privacy laws.
Arellano's comments came a day after Baker said he posed as an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four U.S. soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury, requiring a medical discharge.
Baker, of Georgetown, said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.
You know, this isn't about "supporting the troops" or "hating America" or any of the usual right-wing canards.
You put a man in uniform and give him a gun, but underneath, he's still the same man he was before. There are conscientious servicemen and women who would never take part in something like this, and there are sadistic sons of bitches who gleefully join in. It's foolish to deny their existence. What's supposed to keep the latter from running amuck is discipline and leadership. Right now, leadership is being provided by people who consult with lawyers to see how far they can bend the law before they're prosecuted for war crimes.
The fish rots from the head down.
misleading about sexual relations is not the same thing at all as misleading about our national concerns and our government. Things in our government have now far exceeded the shallow worrying about who is "sleeping" with who and I think any normal would know the difference without it being told to them.
I personally give up on you because you are hopeless.
