White House Forked-Tongue Policies Carry On

The NYT tells us this morning that 90 Candidates for the Iraqi Parliament have been disqualified because of their ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Now that’s interesting. Apparently the Iraqi Court has done what the Bush administration has been unwilling to do. The Baathists were Saddam’s henchmen and have been credited with more than three decades of violence and intimidation. On May 12, 2003, General Tommy Franks made a big show of announcing that the Baath Party had been abolished in Iraq and that one-party rule was over. "The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party is dissolved," Franks said. Then, in a stunning show of two-faced double-dealing, the White House immediately requested that former high-ranking Iraqi government officials, most of whom were Baath members, report for work as usual. Now, the political party in Iraq that the US favors, the Sunni Party, is the party with the former Baath members who have been disallowed by the Iraqi court. And it’s the Sunni Party that is accusing the Shiite party of ballot-box stuffing, and irregularities and is calling for new elections. So let’s see. The Bush administration attacked Iraq and have killed 2,165 American soldiers to rid Iraq of a vile, evil, murderous dictator and his Baath Party that carried out his vile, evil and murderous intentions, and to give Iraq the gift of democracy. But now the Bush administration is pissed off that its favored Iraq party, the Sunnis--which put in power members of the Baath Party who did the bidding of vile, evil murderous Saddam Hussein--did badly in the election. And the Sunnis are pissed off because they say the Shiites committed fraud in the election. And the Bush administration imparted to all Iraqi parties alike the American way of running elections. I think that about sums it up. Meanwhile, back on the torture front, the Bush administration's double-think policies march forward undaunted, and unfazed. The US Pentagon, White House and military commanders are at this very moment, even on Christmas Day, vociferously fighting for the right to torture detainees and prisoners. But this morning the NYT reported that, “The commander of American-run prisons in Iraq says the military will not turn over any detainees or detention centers to Iraqi jailers until American officials are satisfied that the Iraqis are meeting United States standards for the care and custody of detainees.” The NYT article went on to report, “The comments by General Gardner come in the aftermath of two recent raids of Iraqi government detention centers that uncovered scores of abused prisoners.” So what does General Gardner really mean? If the Iraqis meet the US standards, then the Iraqis can torture the detainees to their hearts’ content, right? Then again…who knows? Gardner is a White House-sanctioned American military commander. And it’s impossible to know which side of his mouth he’s speaking from…not to mention trying to translate nonsense spoken around the forked tongue of a Rumsfeld man.