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God’s Errand Boy: The Revelation of St. George

Original version published in The Moscow Times, June 27, 2003. So now we know. After all the mountains of commentary and speculation, all the earnest debates over motives and goals, all the detailed analyses of global strategy and political ideology, it all comes to down to this: George W. Bush waged war on Iraq because, in his own words, God “instructed me to strike at Saddam.” This gospel was revealed, appropriately enough, in the Holy Land this week, through an unusual partnership between the fractious children of Abraham. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz was given detailed minutes of a negotiating session

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Woman, Thou Art Loosed (Not)!

More of the peculiar brand of freedom that Bush has brought to Afghanistan:


Editor of Afghan women’s magazine arrested (via AP)
Excerpt: The editor of an Afghan women’s rights magazine was jailed after a presidential adviser accused him of publishing un-Islamic material — including an article critical of the practice of punishing adultery with 100 lashes, officials said Friday. Minority Shiite Muslim clerics in Kabul objected to that article and another in the monthly Haqooq-i-Zan— or Women’s Rights — that argued that giving up

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Heat Dry Up My Brains

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette gives us a glimpse of compassionate conservatism in action: No aid planned to help low-income families, seniors with energy costs.


Excerpt: The Bush administration yesterday said it has no plans to ask Congress for additional funds to help low-income families and financially stretched seniors deal with rapidly escalating home heating bills. The Energy Department is projecting that this winter’s natural gas prices will run as much as 77 percent more than last winter in parts of the Midwest; home heating in the Northeast could rise by as much as 33 percent,

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Five Feet High and Rising

Our webmaster, toastmaster and master of all trades, Rich Kastelein, digs up this important story from Democracy Now:  After the Flood: Where Have All the Prisoners Gone? More Than 500 From New Orleans
Jail Still Unaccounted For.

These were prisoners abandoned by guards as the flood waters rose. Some
had to break out of their own cells, with the water chest-high; others
descended to the lower levels of the jail to rescue other prisoners.
And lest Bill Bennett and his ilk think this was just a matter of hard-core criminal scum

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Notes From Underground: Exposing the Maw of Bush’s Gulag

This is a slightly expanded version of the column published in the Sept. 30 edition of The Moscow Times, where you will find full annotations and links to sources for this piece. For more, see the earlier posts on this issue: The Good Captain and Dark as a Dungeon. The illustration is by the incomporable Bogorad, the artist for The Moscow Times.

Quietly, firmly, relentlessly, the good captain laid out the list of atrocities committed at the order of the enemies of

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Miraculous Organ: The Revelation of Saint William

Virtuous Bill Bennett dreams of genocide:

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to
reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could
abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go
down.”

That was Bennett, Reaganite moral scold and gambling junkie, holding forth on his radio talk show this week. (Via Media Matters.)
To be sure, Wild Bill then pulled a classic Nixonian maneuver:
divulging an evil intent, then qualifying it, for public consumption,
with pious contextualizing.

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Down in the Flood

When that sad sack of shinola Joe Biden starts
gearing up for his quadrennial failed run for the presidency in 2008,
let’s be sure this little clipping gets a wide airing:

Strict Bankruptcy Law New Blow for [Storm] Victims (NYT).

Biden – the highly perfumed courtesan of the credit
card companies headquartered in his home state — was one of the chief
proponents of this draconian bill (which, by the way, the NYT
completely mischaracterizes in typically pro-corporate fashion in the
above item). Biden’s staunch support helped knee-cap any effective
Democratic opposition to

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Gangster’s Paradise

The indefatigable impresario of this site, Richard Kastelein, has posted an important story in The Pub today,
dealing with rapidly deepening implications of the Jack Abramoff
scandal. As Rich and his links point out, the Abramoff affair is not a
“lobbying scandal”: it’s the linchpin of a vast criminal enterprise
involving every facet of the Bush Administration. Josh Marshall has
been leading the way on this story, which could indeed be the “key to
all mysteries” in piercing the dark heart of the Bush Faction’s
nefarious operation.

The breaking stories all underscore a

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The Good Captain

In regard to the item below, dealing with the further revelations of torture in the Bush gulag brought to light by Army Captain Ian Fishback, we offer this brief ballad in the good captain’s honor.


The Good Captain


Good captain, good captain, now what have you done?
You’ve laid out the dead in the light of the sun.
You’ve opened the door where the dark deeds go on,
Where the fine words of freedom are broken like bones.


Good captain, good captain, you tell us of crime
Done in the name of your country

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Dark as a Dungeon

Below are a couple of vintage pieces that will be used as sources for the upcoming Global Eye column this week, which deals with the revelations of Captain Ian Fishback about the widespread, systematic, countenanced and encouraged use of torture in Bush’s Terror War gulag. Fishback’s devastating evidence, corroborated by other soldiers and gathered over the course of 17 months with the help of his fellow officers, adds even more weight to the mountainous bill of indictment against the Bush Faction. The good captain’s

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