Today cannot pass without acknowledging the lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times, which
spotlights one of the most important reasons to turn the Ignoramus in Chief and his thuggish
minions out of office:
When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal first broke, the Bush administration
struck a pose of righteous indignation. It assured the world that the problem was limited to one
block of one prison, that the United States would never condone the atrocities we saw in those
terrible photos, that it would punish those responsible for any abuse — regardless of their rank —
and that it was committed to defending the Geneva Conventions and the rights of prisoners.
None of this appears to be true. The Army has prosecuted a few low-ranking soldiers and
rebuked a Reserve officer or two, but exonerated the top generals. No political leader is being
held accountable for the policies set in Washington that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at
other prison camps operated by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoner abuse was
systemic.
How many more times must this be said before the American people will hold its leaders
responsible? How long will the cover-up continue? We won’t know until Election Day, when
voters will be put to the test. We know public pressure to hold the Ignoramus and his top officials
to account has not worked so far. We know as long as they remain in office they will do
everything in their power to keep us in the dark.
As the editorial reminds us, two reports this week have revealed that for a year and a half “the
C.I.A., which has a record of hiding prisoners in Iraq from the Red Cross,” violated the Geneva
Conventions by “secretly spirit[ing] a dozen non-Iraqi civilians out of prisons in Iraq to
undisclosed locations.” What makes matters worse:
To justify that operation after the fact, the same legal offices that produced the infamous
paper on how to pretend that torture is legal drew up a new opinion claiming that the president
has the right to decide which prisoners are covered by the Geneva Conventions and which are not.
This happened in secret, at the same time that administration officials were testifying at the
Senate’s Abu Ghraib hearings about the president’s allegiance to the Geneva Conventions and to
American constitutional values when it came to the treatment of
prisoners.
Forgive the lengthy excerpt. But nobody has said it better. The editorial goes on to names
names. You know who they are. You saw them under oath on television “bobbing and weaving,”
as Kerry has said of the White House, ducking responsibility with prevarications.
And what is the Ignoramus’s answer to the American people? His “one-finger victory salute.” As
seen on video some years ago (click that link), it was a callow joke meant for his staff. Seen
today, he’s giving us all the finger.
