For the Record

All hail al-Zaidi

There was never a better reason to throw a shoe:

Zaidi, whose unusual protest overshadowed Bush's final visit to Iraq, insisted he had not planned the December attack.

Instead, he said, Bush's smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq enraged him as he thought of "the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women.

"He was talking and at the same time smiling icily at the (Iraqi) prime minister. He said to the prime minister that he was going to have dinner with him," Zaidi told a three-judge panel, a small army of 25 defence lawyers lined up next to him.

"Suddenly, I saw no one in the room but Bush. I felt the blood of innocents was running under his feet while he was smiling coldly as if he had come to write off Iraq with a farewell meal."

Zaidi added: "After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction ... I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him."

At the time, Zaidi shouted at Bush that the shoe-throwing was a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."

One of the things I love about Toronto is that the Star publishes stories like this all the time.

Epic fail

Nick Burbules (editor of the invaluable Progressive Blog Digest) is devoting today's post to summarizing some of the truly astonishing low-lights of the catastrophic Bush presidency.  Goodbye and good riddance to that illegally installed ignoramus and his malignant manipulators.

Of course, the Bush/Cheney "legacy" will long be with us---in millions of lives destroyed and relatedly, in a fundamentalist Islamic community that has been handed all the ideological ammunition it could ever want; in an economy trashed by deregulation; in government offices heavily populated with incompetent cronies; and so on.

Perhaps the biggest legacy, in the long run (putting aside the now increased possibilities of world-wide destruction, of both climatic and non-climatic varieties) is not so different, when you think about it, from that the Germans inherited: the knowledge that our government can be hijacked, and that many of us will go along for the ride, cheering along the way.

Here, as there, the biggest questions for the future are: can we prevent this from ever happening again?  And if so, how? 

I don't have an answer to the second question (though again, we might look to Germany for some ideas).  However, it seems that a necessary condition on the bare possibility of future prevention is that we recognize, not just as individuals but as a nation, that in the installation and the implementation of the Bush/Cheney regime gross wrongs occurred.  Without public recognition of that fact---of the sort that effective investigations, into (a) the crimes of the Bush administration, and (b) of the institutional and personal mechanisms (within the judiciary, the legislature, the military, governmental offices, and the media as well as the executive offices) allowing the associated gross wrongs, might be expected to produce---no change to these mechanisms will occur, and the conditions for future usurpation of our government in service of vile and unconscionable ends will remain intact.

Bush signature on torture authorization

I'm reposting this 7 February 2002 memo, signed by Bush. (Source: this archive, which I discovered via this dKos diary.)

The central finding of the memo is that members of AQ are not covered under either article 3 or 4 of the Geneva Conventions. Accordingly, "detainees" held to be members of AQ need be "treated in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva" only insofar as is "appropriate and consistent with military necessity". In other words, torture away.

The central finding is clearly false. According to convention IV, part 1, article 4, paragraph 4:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.

There you have it, war crimes approved by Bush's hand.

Powerful idea

Over at Huffington Post they are selling posters which list events, names, and slogans evoking various nightmares of the Bush years (with the tag line: 'Haven't we had enough?  Democrats '08).  Proceeds will go to plaster giant versions on the walls of buildings in NY, LA, and DC, assuming they can find buildings tall enough.

What can one say about this sort of thing?

This is what the U.S. abroad has come to.

Horrible John Howard voted out

Good riddance.

Bush wishes he could do this

Musharraf imposes military rule:

Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup and is also head of Pakistan's army, suspended the constitution on Saturday ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on whether his recent re-election as president was legal. He ousted seven independent-minded Supreme Court judges, put a stranglehold on independent media and granted sweeping powers to authorities to crush dissent.

One small difference: Bush would probably keep the complicit Supreme Court who anti-democratically installed him in the first place.

Hat tip to my most excellent stepfather, Don Doiron.

The new Agent Orange

As many as 20% of troops may have suffered brain damage after exposure to high-velocity explosions.

Bush wars to cost 40 times estimates

8K for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

A nameless and bottomless dread

Yes, I too feel it.  Aaiiiiiii!!!