Tuesday, December 04, 2018

What is the bill for us taxpayers?

Patrick Martin has a great article at WSWS on the passing of War Criminal George HW Bush but what I want to highlight from it is one of the comments:


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Just as a matter of record I wonder how much the George H.W. Bush funeral spectacle is costing the taxpayers. We cannot afford Medicare for all but we can afford to squander unlimited taxpayer dollars to parade around and ultimately drop in a hole in the ground the putrid corpse of the man who put Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.



  • That's a solid point.  How much taxpayer money is going to be wasted on these ceremonial events for a bastard who should have died years ago?

    A national day of mourning?  What are we?  A third world nation?  Day of mourning for a War Criminal who was awful to Americans and even worse to those around the world.

    I'm not mourning and I'm not going to join in the pretense that Bush did anything worthy of applause.

    This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot " for Monday:


    Monday, December 3, 2018.  As the Iraq War continues, a War Criminal passes away.


    Over the weekend, War Criminal George HW Bush went off to spend the rest of his days with Satan.  While the corporate media -- and some appalling liars in the Democratic Party -- tried to spit polish the War Criminal, even non-stop swiping of the tongues could not wash the blood of so many innocents off Poppy Bush.

    On Twitter, the especially stupid insisted Poppy Bush had never gone to war with Iraq (the Gulf War was never heard of by their 'beautiful' minds) and insisted that the family must be allowed to grieve in a criticism free environment.

    The Bush Crime Family?

    That's who we're talking about.  No sympathy for any of the victims, any of the innocents, but how dare you call a War Criminal a "War Criminal" when his teary eyed and greedy relatives hadn't yet divided up the spoils?  The Bush Crime Family excelled at the kind of cons Moms Mabley takes on in Stan Lathan's AMAZING GRACE.  And, as she notes in the movie, they've got the TV and the radio and the newspapers.  All we have is the truth.


    The Bush Crime Family.  Prescott Bush -- Poppy's father -- flirted with overthrowing FDR and, of course, heavy petted with the Nazis.  In 2004, Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell (GUARDIAN) reported:

    George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
    The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
    His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

    The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. 


    And on FDR, Scott Horton (HARPER'S) explained in 2007:

    In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. Roth’s novel is developed from several strands of this factual account; he assumed the plot is actually carried out, whereas in fact an alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available.
    The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.

    Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as a hero.


    The Bush Crime Family.

    Let's move over to Poppy Bush.  Let's start with the rumors.  This is a man so vile, no one blinked an eye when it was rumored he was behind the shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan.  Books have since been written of the allegation. Poppy Bush?  I don't know why others cal him Poppy Bush.  I call him that -- and have for decades -- because of the rumors that he was a pedophile who preyed on kids.  He is that disgusting.


    As Elaine noted over the weekend of Poppy's death:



    I'm not crying.

    In the media lies that will follow, will anyone note the front page headline that most remember from that time?


    george w bush a homosexual and pedophile 11


    Probably not.


    The prostitution inquiry was said to involve both men and underage boys.  There was also the Larry King scandal (not the talk show host).  But the whispers around Poppy Bush were loud and maybe it was living where I did (the Bay Area) where his mistress (not Jennifer, the other one) lived on a house boat made the rumors fly a little more?  Who knows?

    But the rumors also included that he was part of the conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy and that he was in Dallas at the time.  He insisted that must have been some other George Bush.

    But he is so vile that these rumors and much more never seemed implausible.

    In the 80s, in Reagan's second term, I was asked by a friend with THE POST why I loathed Bush so much when I disagreed with Reagan?  Reagan did a lot that I feel was wrong.  But that's normal when you are on opposite ends of the political spectrum.  When it came to Poppy Bush, my problem was that you got the feeling he would sell his own mother to the Saudi royals if he thought it would advance him in any way.

    Willie Horton.

    It is appalling that in the so-called #MeToo environment, we're embracing a racist.  That is what Poppy Bush was.  You don't use a scare tactic, a racial scare tactic, in an attempt to win the presidential race in 1988 and get to pretend you didn't.  It was his campaign.  He could have stopped it at any time.  He could have prevented it.  But he went with it and he embraced it.  And it's so very telling of how far we have not come that in 2018 a racist is being mourned.

    So much of his history -- all?  - requires that we rebuke him, not mourn him.  Let's note the late Robert Parry (CONSORTIUM NEWS):

    Though the circumstances are obviously quite different, Philby’s recognition that his patrician birth and his powerful connections gave him extraordinary protections could apply to George H.W. Bush and his forceful denials of any role in the Iran-Contra scandal – he falsely claimed to be “out of the loop” – and also the October Surprise issue, whether the Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran began in 1980 with the obstruction of President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. Embassy hostages seized by Iranian radicals on Nov. 4, 1979.
    Carter’s failure to secure the hostages’ release before the U.S. election, which fell exactly one year later, doomed his reelection chances and cleared the way for Reagan and the Republicans to gain control of both the White House and the Senate. The hostages were only released after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981, and as Bush became Vice President.
    We now know that soon after the Reagan-Bush inauguration, clandestine U.S.-approved arms shipments were making their way to Iran through Israel. An Argentine plane carrying one of the shipments crashed in July 1981 but the incriminating circumstances were covered up by Reagan’s State Department, according to then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes, who traced the origins of the arms deal back to the 1980 campaign.
    This hard-to-believe reality – that the tough-guy Reagan-Bush administration was secretly shipping weapons to Iran after Tehran’s mullahs had humiliated the United States with the hostage crisis – remained a topic for only occasional Washington rumors until November 1986 when a Beirut newspaper published the first article describing another clandestine shipment. That story soon expanded into the Iran-Contra Affair because some of the arm sales profits were diverted to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
    For Bush, the emergence of this damaging scandal, which could have denied him his own shot at the White House, was time to test out his ability to “deny everything.” So, he denied knowing that the White House had been secretly running a Contra resupply operation in defiance of Congress, even though his office and top aides were in the middle of everything. Regarding the Iran arms deals, Bush insisted publicly he was “out of the loop.”
    Behind closed doors where he ran the risk of perjury charges, Bush was more forthcoming. For instance, in non-public testimony to the FBI and the Iran-Contra prosecutor, “Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales.” [See Special Prosecutor’s Final Iran-Contra Report, p. 473]

    But Bush’s public “out of the loop” storyline, more or less, held up going into the 1988 presidential election. The one time when he was directly challenged with detailed Iran-Contra questions was in a live, on-air confrontation with CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Jan. 25, 1988.

    Let's stay with Parry to note this from 2000, on how Poppy Bush covered up for terrorism:


    In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.
    The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.
    In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.
    The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.
    In the report, the CIA also acknowledged publicly for the first time that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination. The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the murders and included that suspicion in an internal cable the same month.

    “CIA’s first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October 1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing, the CIA disclosed.
    Nevertheless, the CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.
    Relying on the word of Bush’s CIA, Newsweek reported that “the Chilean secret police were not involved” in the Letelier assassination. “The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.” [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]

    Bush, who later became the 41st president of the United States (and is the father of the 43rd president), has never explained his role in putting out the false cover story that diverted attention away from the real terrorists. Nor has Bush explained what he knew about the Chilean intelligence operation in the weeks before Letelier and Moffitt were killed.


    We could go on and on.  Poppy Bush was so vile that nothing could emerge at this point that would shock anyone.

    He started the Gulf War with lies.  There was no need for it.  Then-Senator Al Gore was against it.  So, even in the lead up, were a large number of Americans -- at least 48% felt that the US government was wrongly rushing off to war.  But Poppy wanted his war.  He knew lies were the way to get it, so he had a young woman pretend to be a hospital volunteer (she was from the royal family in Kuwait) lie to the world in front of a Congressional caucus that Iraqi soldiers were tossing babies out of incubators in Kuwait -- hundreds of babies.  It was a lie and it was used to sell the war and only after it was over did Americans learn that the testimony and the identity of the 'witness' had all been lies.


    Lies is what the media's offering now.  The Bush crime Family has always been so very good at spinning.  Here's Joan Didion from THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS in 1988:

    In August of 1986 George Bush, traveling in his role as vice-president of the United States and accompanied by his staff, the Secret Service, the traveling press, and a personal camera crew wearing baseball caps reading “Shooters, Inc.,” and working on a $10,000 retainer paid by a Bush PAC called the Fund for America’s Future, spent several days in Israel and Jordan. The schedule in Israel included, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, shoots at the Western Wall, at the Holocaust memorial, at David Ben-Gurion’s tomb, and at thirty-two other locations chosen to produce campaign footage illustrating that George Bush was, as Marlin Fitzwater, at that time the Bush press secretary, put it, “familiar with the issues.”
    The Shooters, Inc., crew did not go on to Jordan (there was, an official explained to the Los Angeles Times, “nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs”), but the Bush advance team had nonetheless directed, in Amman, considerable attention toward improved visuals for the traveling press. The advance team had requested, for example, that the Jordanian army marching band change its uniforms from white to red; that the Jordanians, who did not have enough helicopters to transport the press, borrow some from the Israeli air force; that, in order to provide the color of live military action behind the Vice-President, the Jordanians stage maneuvers at a sensitive location overlooking Israel and the Golan Heights; that the Jordanians raise the American flag over its base there; that Bush be photographed looking through binoculars studying “enemy territory,” a shot ultimately vetoed by the State Department since the “enemy territory” at hand was Israel; and, possibly the most arresting detail, that camels be present at every stop on the itinerary.
    Some months later I happened to be in Amman, and mentioned reading about this Bush trip to several American embassy officials. They could have, it was agreed, “cordially killed” the reporters in question, particularly Charles P. Wallace from the Los Angeles Times, but the reports themselves had been accurate. “You didn’t hear this, but they didn’t write half of it,” one said.


    Iraq suffered under Poppy Bush and under Bully Boy Bush and it continues to suffer today:


    Forward deployed to Iraq and providing the core of the Combined Joint Task Force — Operation Inherent Resolve headquarters, the of XVIII Airborne Corps are supporting our partners in the fight against ISIS. Stay up to date with the .






    That's right, US forces remain in Iraq.

    Barack Obama in 2008 (and Nancy Pelosi in 2006) campaigned on the promise to get all US troops out of Iraq.  Never happened, did it?

    When do US troops get to leave?

    When is the war over?

    When ISIS is defeated?  That still hasn't happened.


    ISIS never left Iraq and, despite then-prime minister Hayder al-Abadi's claim in December 2017, was never vanquished. Now, PBS reports, it "has risen again at the nexus of four provinces, Kirkuk, Salahuddin, Diyala and Sulaimania."  From THE NEWSHOUR report:





  • DLER GHAZI:
    ISIS will always exist in Iraq and in Syria, and that's because of the political instability in the region.
  • SIMONA FOLTYN:
    Dler Ghazi works for the Kurdish counter-terrorism service. He was in charge of security in Tuz Khurmatu for ten years until the Iraqi Government forced his unit to withdraw last October. I met him in the Kurdish city of Suleimania.
  • DLER GHAZI:
    The presence of ISIS in our area is because of the security vacuum between us, the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the government of Iraq. And in addition there's a political crisis between us that has allowed such groups to spring up between our borders.
  • SIMONA FOLTYN:
    Ghazi agrees to take us to the Kurdish areas that have been most affected by ISIS' resurgence.
  • DLER GHAZI:
    This is the last outpost, a little bit further it's ISIS. These guys are volunteers, they are from Tuz Khurmatu and the area. They are volunteering to defend this region from ISIS.




  • SIMONA FOLTYN:
    There's no doubt that ISIS has exploited the conflict between the Kurds and the Shia-led government in Baghdad. To find out just how much control the militants have managed to assert over civilians, I travel to rural areas near the Sunni town of Hawija. Hawija was an ISIS stronghold for three years, and was one of the last towns security forces freed in october 2017. Soon after, the government declared victory over ISIS in Iraq. Now, less than a year after Hawija was retaken by the Iraqi government, ISIS has regrouped and is terrorizing the population.




  • And ISIS continues to launch attacks such as the one noted by Baxtiyar Goran.




    ISIS launched two separate attacks on the Iraqi security forces near ’s Rashad sub-district tonight, 2 security personnel/civil killed and 4 others wounded.



    And there's also the attack in Falluja.





    : Increasing activity in the area of . Photos shows an squad storming a building of Iraqi army guards and killing all of them in north western Fallujah






    has released a new photo series from , . ISIS militants raided the meeting.









  • Increasing numbers of government officials killed at home. Here ISIS reports a raid south of Falluja

    Fellucede iD müfrezeleri baskınlara devam ediypr.







    But if the US has to make Iraq violence free for US troops to come home, that's never going to happen.  ISIS is far from the only terrorists storming across Iraq.  There's also those militias -- the ones Hayder made part of the official forces.




    More harassment from PMU-Shabak (Shia Iran-backed) forces who blocked entrance to St George Church in native Iraqi Christian town of Bartella, Iraq, began firing guns to scare Christians &threatened a priest. They are a new ISIS. must move Shabaks out of Bartella.