Bush has no excuse in abuse scandal : Andrew Greeley

[jbfam4]

Bush has no excuse in abuse scandal

May 14, 2004
http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel14.html

BY ANDREW GREELEY

The current shock and outrage at the White House and the Pentagon are as phony as a $17 bill. The president might not have known what was happening specifically at Abu Ghraib, but had to know in general how the CIA and military intelligence were "softening up" prisoners for interrogation. Could he have been so stupid to think that captured al-Qaida leaders had a change of heart and freely revealed their secrets?


It is unthinkable that the top brass in the government were not aware that the CIA was playing such games with captives in many detention centers. It is also unthinkable that congressional leaders and senior journalists did not know about this interrogation of captives in the search for weapons of mass destruction. If the president did not know, then he was guilty of what we used to call in the seminary "vincible" ignorance. He should have known, and there is no excuse for him not knowing. One can bet on it: The low-level grunts will be blamed, and the CIA and the MI brass will go unscathed. Also, poor Don Rumsfeld might have to take the fall to cover for the president.


The Iraqis don't like us and don't want us around. In the copyrighted Gallup survey of Iraqi attitudes, 58 percent of the respondents said that U.S. troops had behaved badly even before the Abu Ghraib pictures appeared -- 81 percent in Baghdad. Seventy-one percent of them see the Americans as occupiers, not liberators; 40 percent think that attacks on the Americans are justified, and only one-third of the Arabs think they are better off under the Americans than under Saddam (87 percent of the Kurds do).

Our troops are not to blame for Iraqi hostility. Rather, the Bush administration, which sent them into the war untrained and unequipped to be an occupying army, much less a counter-insurgency force, is responsible. The troops do not speak the language, do not understand the culture and religion, and cannot distinguish the harmless Iraqi from someone who wants to kill them. It is unfair and cruel to force young soldiers -- and even worse, older reservists and National Guard members -- to struggle in such an impossible situation.

The president is the responsible person in this country; the buck stops at his desk, as Harry Truman said once and forever. He may scapegoat others, he may duck and weave, but either he knew what was going on or should have known. Those Americans who will vote to re-elect him will support the man responsible for Abu Ghraib.

[GainesT1958]

1. It's really sad that, in Dub's view of things...

"pResidential Infallibility" also means "absolution of pResidential responsibility"!:mad:

B-)

[indepat]

2. Surely he has an excuse for he is never at fault, never fails to do the

right (far-right) thing, never does anything wrong, and the buck never stops with him: but never fail to give him full credit for anything remotely good that just happens to happen.

[Wetzelbill]

3. Father Greeley is always dead on