By Dave Lindorff

I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few
people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved
for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

I’d be satisfied if they just stuck to the ones used against
15-year-old Omar Khadr—techniques that a US federal judge established
constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I have a 15-year old son, so I’m particularly aware of what an
atrocity it has been the way the US has treated Khadr, and some 2500
other young boys and teenagers that it admits to having captured and
labeled as “enemy combatants” in its so-called “war on terror.”

By Dave Lindorff

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of the
warmongers and terror-pimps in the White House would have us believe
that Omar Khadr is a monster. Khadr is the 21-year-old Canadian who is
facing one of the first show-trials at Guantanamo.

But let’s just step back a minute and consider Mr. Khadr’s case.

The son of an alleged Islamic fundamentalist, Khadr was sent to one
of those fundamentalist madrassa schools in Pakistan back when he was
14. From there, he went to Afghanistan, to join with the Taliban in
fighting against the remnant warlord backers of the Soviet Union, which
had attempted to run Afghanistan as a vassal state.

Then came 9-11 and the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.
Young Khadr suddenly found himself fighting against the world’s most
powerful military.

By Dave Lindorff

Is anyone surprised that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that the Bush/Cheney administration’s authorization of torture of captives has been consistently legal and in compliance with all treaties the US has signed, including the Geneva Conventions?

After all, she was at the meetings in the White House in 2001 at which various acts of torture, ranging from waterboarding to exposure to extreme heat and cold, to enforced long periods in stress positions, and to treatments which have not been disclosed (no doubt because they are so outrageous and offensive to common decency) were dreamed up, proposed and approved for use—meetings that were manifestly criminal in nature and in violation of international and US law.

By Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

Wow! Watch Rep. Robert Wexler calmly ask Condi about all of her pre-war lies, as documented by the Center for Public Integrity - and watch Condi freak out with barely-controlled rage at Wexler for daring to question her integrity utter corruption:

I don't have a transcript yet, but I heard Condi tell several entirely new lies about her old lies.

I'd even say Condi just opened herself up to perjury charges. (It doesn't matter if she was under oath; lying to Congress is always a crime.)

What do you think?

By Dave Lindorff

When journalists are caught lying outright, they can be fired, and can even find their careers terminated. Take Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who made up a story about a young drug user. A decade after her firing, she was earning $6/hour as a Liz Claiborne clerk in a department store. Or consider Stephen Glass, who famously made up stories at the New Republic. He landed on his feet as a fiction writer, but his journalism days are over.

So what to do about George Bush and his gang of fabulists, who now, thanks to a study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, stand shown to have lied to Congress and the American people 935 times in what the two organizations say was "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

This is an amazing photo.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, right, is confronted by CodePink member Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz, her hands painted red, as she arrives to testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007, before the House Foreign Relations Committee hearing regarding US policy in the Middle East ,where she spoke about Iraq, Iran, and the Israel Palestinian conflict. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Ali-Fairooz is looking directly into Condi's eyes, but Condi can't bear to look back because Ali-Fairooz's bloody hands hold a mirror to her soul.

The Vatican’s recent snub of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is only the latest salvo in the battle between Pope Benedict XVI and President George W. Bush. This tug of war has profound implications for both U.S. foreign policy and the critical Catholic vote in 2008's presidential race.

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Overlapping Agendas

Things haven't always been tense between Bush and Benedict. They share similar views regarding abortion, gay marriage, and other hot-button conservative issues. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (as Benedict was known before becoming Pope in April 2005) even helped Bush secure the White House for a second term.

Omigod. Speaking of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) leader, Condi Rice told FOX News:

He was diabolically brilliant. I think he was an outstanding organizer, I think he had a kind of strategic sense, and I don’t think the follow-on leadership has been quite as good. So when you hear people say, “You know, well, if you kill one of them, they’ll just replace him with another leader,” remember that that’s like saying, you know, if you take out Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant, well, they’ll just replace them with another leader.

Condi compared one of the most evil terrorists in the world to two of our most sacred Generals?

By Francis T. Mandanici

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on April 18 concerning her involvement in the claims that the Administration made prior to the war that Iraq had sought uranium for nuclear weapons.  Chairman Henry A. Waxman of that committee in a letter to Rice dated April 9 has asked Rice to testify as to whether she knew why President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address cited forged evidence about Iraq's efforts to procure uranium from Niger and whether she knew before that Address about the doubts that the CIA and State Department had raised concerning the veracity of that uranium claim.  Waxman has also asked Rice to explain her January 23, 2003 op-ed article.  In that article entitled Why We Know Iraq Is Lying, which Rice wrote when she was the National Security Advisor for President Bush, she stated that Iraq had lied in its prewar declaration to the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction because Iraq's declaration "fail[ed] to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad."