End the War on Freedom

"Old soldiers with bad gums find out too late whom they really served." -- Steve Mason

# Robert Fisk at The Independent via Truthout - The Reality of This Barbaric Bombing - just listen to what the terrorists say, and you'll know why they bombed London. Still inexcusable, but so was Bushnev's bombing of Baghdad. [root]

And it's no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush's policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.

It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" - of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism".

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A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways). Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent - are characteristic of al-Qa'ida. And let us not use - as our television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word identified with quality silver rather than base metal.

And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.

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And this is part of the point of yesterday's bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blair claims to resent.

# Elaine Cassel at CityPages - Fenced Out of the Fourth of July - Ms. Cassel used to bicycle into DC every Independence Day. She stopped after her experience there in 2003. July fourth is now a day of mourning for her. [root]

Oh, yes, you could visit the [Jefferson] Memorial. A large tent staffed with dozens of cops, a walkway with a metal detector, a place to have your backpack searched-that's all that stood in your way. A large sign said, "Memorial open. Pass through security." I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, I hope Jefferson is watching and shedding a tear.

I passed on the opportunity to commune with him. Not before thinking how life had changed forever in the nation's capital. Not because of 9/11, not because of Osama bin Laden, not because of Saddam Hussein. But because George Bush, the bully, the tyrant, the cowboy who highjacked the election, George Bush had hijacked the 4th of July.

# Chris Floyd - Global Eye: Aa Aa Aa - on the revelation of the Bush terror cabal at the hands of his personal physician, and the evidence erasure carried out in Baghdad by AG Gonzales. [root]

The graphic horrors of physical torture, captured in the infamous pictures from Abu Ghraib, have understandably garnered most of the attention in the media's occasional glances at Bush's concentration camps. And here, under pressure, the White House has reluctantly made a few cosmetic changes, limiting to some extent the knuckle-work that interrogators can use -- although PHR notes that many of these ballyhooed "reforms" have never been implemented. In any case, these restrictions can be suspended in cases of "military necessity," as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld always notes carefully in his instructions to the cadres. And of course, none of the published restrictions on military interrogators apply in the super-secret CIA quadrants of the gulag, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed Congress this year.

But while eighty-sixing the brass knucks -- in mixed company, at least -- Bush and Rumsfeld have continued to implement a range of mind-breaking psychological tortures, the official documents show. These are practices that PHR notes are "immoral and ... illegal under the Geneva Conventions, ... [U.S.] domestic law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." These codified crimes are spread across the gulag's 42 prisons, where some 11,000 men are now caged -- many of them innocent of any wrongdoing, all of them held without charges in an endless legal limbo.

This nightmare machinery was set in motion by Gonzales, who, at Bush's order, led the White House legal team in drawing up official memos justifying the use of torture to the very point of death, and declaring that Bush was not bound by any laws in his role as "commander-in-chief." This monstrous perversion of justice was a virtual coup d'etat, establishing the president as a military autocrat and fostering an atmosphere of lawlessness and brutality "up and down the chain of command."

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