Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."





The question here isn't whether Holder will be confirmed -- it's a near certainty that he will. The question is what the hell answer was it they expected? The idea that waterboarding doesn't fit the definition of torture was always a legal fiction designed to create a loophole. Only ideologues and fools bought it. Any honest reading of the law would find it to be torture.

Which leaves John Cornyn, whose vocal support for torture would cause any principled human being to be ashamed of himself, in a bit of a quandary; he can try to block Holder's confirmation, but what would be the point? The next nominee would give the same answer -- and the next and the next. See, that's the problem with being dead wrong. You have to look long and hard for someone who'll agree with you.

In fact, the torture debate is pretty much over. Turns out, we're pretty solidly against it. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that most respondents opposed torture -- in any circumstance. In a question that suggests even the ridiculous "ticking time bomb" scenario, people where asked, "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"

58% -- a clear majority -- said no, torture should never be used, regardless of the circumstance. This would've been higher, but Republicans continue to be outside the mainstream and throw the average. For Democrats, 71% said no. Independents against torture number 56%. Only Republicans support torture, with just 42% believing it should never be used. Still, even that number shows only weak support for torture.

Their support may be a moot point, however. In their grilling of Holder over waterboarding, they may have opened a big can of worms. Not only is torture illegal, but the law requires that it be investigated and prosecuted. By getting Holder to drop the "T" word, the senate may have begun a sequence of events that guarantee prosecutions.

When Ronald Reagan signed on to the Convention Against Torture, he brought us into the realm of international law. The convention is a treaty and treaties are the be-all and end-all if international law -- torture's illegal because we agreed it should be. That convention reads, "Each State Party [i.e., signatory nation] shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law," and that, if torture is committed, the nation must "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

There aren't any exceptions here. It must happen. If Holder -- or any other would-be Attorney General, for that matter -- believes that we've waterboarded detainees (and no one thinks we haven't), he has to prosecute. His hands are tied.

In fact, torture prosecutions could happen outside the US, since torture is a violation of international law and a war crime. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called on the United States to prosecute George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing the Convention Against Torture, Nowak says the US has a "clear obligation" under law. If it doesn't happen here, it might just happen in The Hague.

Republicans seem to suddenly have become aware of reality and, like John Cornyn, are trying to put the brakes on what may very well be inevitable. They're trying to slow things down long enough to figure out what the hell to do and it may just be that there's nothing at all that can be done.

-Wisco

On the Nobel Peace Prize and the Buggy Whip Industry

It was a bad day for climate change deniers worldwide yesterday, when former Vice President Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri.

According to the Norwegian Aftenposten, "Pachauri said the actual costs of mitigating climate change aren't as high as many might think, especially if they're taken during the next seven years before the consequences of global warming become irreversible. Nor, he said, do emissions control measure need to halt economic growth."

Pachuari was countering a climate change skeptic argument -- one shared by the Bush administration -- that reducing carbon emissions would be bad for economies. It's hard to see the reasoning here. You develop new technologies and new industries and that's supposed to hurt business? Look at the computer boom -- how was suddenly doing everything differently bad for the economy? Even breweries are computerized now. These aren't the concerns voiced by people thinking about the future, they're the concerns of those invested in the status quo. It's the argument of the buggy whip industry against horseless carriages.

In fact, Pachuari pointed out that dealing with the effects of climate change would be more expensive than controlling it. "Where extreme weather events become more intense or more frequent with climate change, the economic and social costs of those events will increase," he told the audience in Oslo. How much did Hurricane Katrina, in purely monetary terms, cost us? More than "three-quarter billion in federal dollars" have been spent just reimbursing local agencies, according to FEMA. Untold hundreds of millions more were spent by insurance companies and other private business. Even more was raised by charities. And it's still not enough. Even if we completely disregard the human cost, there's no way we can afford to do this very often.

Gore's speech was more direct. "We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency," he said, "A threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- though not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly."

He also accused two of the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses -- China and the US -- of using each other's inaction as an excuse for their own. "Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment," he said.

Gore predicted a policy change for the US, no matter who won the 2008 elections. "I think that they do not accurately represent the wishes of the American people," he said of the Bush administration -- at least, indirectly. "We are in the midst of a process of massive change. The world is coming to grips with this crisis, but we are in a race against time. The United States of America, the natural leader of the world community, should lead instead of obstructing."

In awarding the prizes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee acknowledged that this year's choice of laureates was politically inspired. "The Norwegian Nobel committee rarely raises its voice," he said. "Our style is largely sober. But it is a long time since the committee was concerned with such fundamental questions as this year."

Writes climate activist and actress Laurie David for the Huffington Post, "Rarely also does the largely Norwegian audience break into a standing ovation but it did today after Al Gore's powerful and emotional speech. 'The earth has a fever. And the fever is rising...something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.'"

The audience is right, Gore is right, the Nobel Committee is right, and Rajendra Pachauri are right. If there's anything you can do to get the ball rolling here, you should do it.

Go ahead and disregard the folks with the buggy whips.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; climate; environment; Norway; international; UN; Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, and the Nobel Prize Committee are right -- the only wrong approach to dealing with global warming is sitting on your ass

Bush's Global Warming 'Solution'

President Bush has decided to do something about climate change. That's the good news. The bad news is that what he's decided to do is talk about it. At a summit on climate change last week, Bush addressed the world's top polluting nations. The idea was to come up with something to replace the Kyoto protocols, which expire in 2012.

Bush's plan can be boiled down to one point, "Do whatever the hell you want."

His idea is to set what he calls a "long-term goal" -- a pretty vague target -- for reducing carbon emissions. And even this soft target is too restrictive for him. He's not going to tell anyone how to run their country -- a new development for the leader of the neocon administration.

"This new approach must involve all the world's largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions, including developed and developing nations," Bush said. "We will set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem. And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it."

Bush's plan is to let each nation "design its own separate strategies for making progress toward achieving this long-term goal." That'd be that undefined long-term goal. He might as well have said, "We'll get it done by later."

People who give a damn are less than impressed. "President Bush's climate meeting today achieved nothing. The president had nothing new to say on the two biggest issues on the agenda: what global emissions reductions must be achieved by mid-century, and what the United States is willing to do to meet that goal," said the Union of Concerned Scientists' Alden Meyer on friday, "It's like inviting people to a dinner party and putting no food on the table." Others made more damning comparisons.

"This is akin to convening a meeting of top slave owners to talk about ending the slave trade -- at some unspecified future time and with the least inconvenience to themselves," Saleemul Huq, one of the members of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said.

Bush's own bad idea for America's energy future includes "working to reduce barriers to new nuclear power plants in the country without compromising safety." The problem here is that, despite industry hype, nuclear power won't do a damned thing to reduce greenhouse gases. The nuclear industry spends a lot of time concentrating on the fact that there's almost zero emissions at the point of generation -- i.e., the plant -- and neglect to tell you how that "clean" fuel is made.

Mining and refining uranium is an extremely dirty process. For every 1,000 tons of uranium mined, you get only 50 tons of useable ore. That makes mining and refining a 95% inefficient process. The unuseable ore -- i.e., 95% of the uranium mined -- winds up piled in toxic slag heaps. All the drilling and digging and driving is gas powered and 95% of that gas burning accomplishes nothing. And this "clean" energy source creates waste that remains toxic for 10,000 to 250,000 years. So much for what Bush calls "the one existing source of energy that can generate massive amounts of electricity without causing any air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions." That statement is only true if you ignore the fact that you don't pull refined uranium out of your butt.

For the record, you don't.

Bush's "do whatever the hell you want" solution took a hit shortly after his big summit. The Washington Post published a story on the EPA under Bush sunday. It wasn't good news. If we use the US as a model and a leader in this new approach to climate change, then it's absolutely, positively, 100% guaranteed to fail.

The Environmental Protection Agency's pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data.

The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics.

Critics of the agency say its flagging efforts have emboldened polluters to flout U.S. environmental laws, threatening progress in cleaning the air, protecting wildlife, eliminating hazardous materials, and countless other endeavors overseen by the EPA.

So we're not even enforcing the laws we have and we want other nations to follow our lead? How's that going to work? WaPo quotes Eric Schaeffer, the former EPA director for the Office of Civil Enforcement as saying, "I don't think this is a problem with agents in the field. They're capable of doing the work. They lack the political support they used to be able to count on, especially in the White House." Schaeffer resigned in 2002, to protest the EPA's lack of enforcement.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the White House plan to combat climate change is "do whatever the hell you want." After all, that was Bush's plan for Texas. That worked out great. In 2000, PBS reported, "Environmentalists point to the fact that during Bush's tenure, Texas has achieved the dubious distinction, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, of having the dirtiest air in America, of ranking 47th in water quality, and having the seventh-highest rate of release of toxic industrial byproducts onto its land."

Bush pushed a "voluntary emissions program," which was a "predictable failure." Being voluntary, most polluters opted out and did whatever the hell they wanted. Far from getting a handle on pollution, Bush gave polluters free reign.

As I said, the good news is that Bush has decided to do something about climate change. The bad news is that what he's decided to do is talk about it. The time for talk is quickly passing and there's no reason to believe that George W. Bush is willing to do anything more.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; energy; nuclear; propaganda; UN; environment; science; CO2; Bush has a plan for global warming and it's to talk about getting a plan for global warming

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Sixty years ago, representatives from 16 nations gathered to begin deliberations on a new international bill of rights. The document they produced is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- and it stands as a landmark achievement in the history of human liberty. It opens by recognizing "the inherent dignity" and the "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as "the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world." And as we gather for this 62nd General Assembly, the standards of the Declaration must guide our work in this world.
-- George W. Bush, address to United Nations General Assembly, 2007

When President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly yesterday, he used the occasion to remind that body of its dedication to human rights. He cited human rights abuses in Myanmar -- which he refered to as "Burma," Myanmar being beyond his modest pronunciation skills -- in Cuba, in "Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Iran."

Bush called on the UN to reform. "To be credible on human rights in the world," he said, "The United Nations must reform its own Human Rights Council." Clearly, this man's call for human rights stirred the assembly. Many must've been busy picking their jaws up off the ground and saying to each other, "Geez, this idiot's got a lot of balls!"

See, as long as we're talking about credibility on human rights, we have to consider Bush's. He doesn't have any. The cuban delegation walked out on Bush -- they're not happy with Guantanamo Bay.

Seeing how Bush brought up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, let's take a look at the parts of it that he didn't mention -- mostly because he didn't dare.

You don't have to read far into it to get to Bush's first violation. Article 5 reads, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." It just goes downhill from there.

Art. 6 tells us, "Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." He flunks Art. 7, which reads, "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination." He violates Art. 8 -- "Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law."

So far, so bad. Art. 9 ("No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile"), Art. 10 ("Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him"), and Art. 11 ("Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence") all fall by the wayside.

We're still not done. Bush's wiretapping violates Art. 12 -- "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

He's got a lot of guts lecturing anyone on abuses of human rights. The man responsible for kidnappings overseas and at home, of torture, of detention without trial, doesn't get to do that. The man responsible for the following doesn't get to do that:

The Guardian:

The story that [Khalid] el-Masri tells [police] by way of explanation, on this evening in late May 2004, is extraordinary: a story of how an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a New Year's holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five months after first being seized, he says, still with no explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in an unknown country which turned out to be Albania.

El-Masri, completely innocent of any wrongdoing, was -- according to Amnesty International -- "arrested and unlawfully detained... He was handed over to US agents and secretly flown to Afghanistan as part of the US programme of secret detentions and renditions -- the illegal transfer of people between states outside of any judicial process." He hasn't even gotten so much as an apology.

The leader of the country that does that gets to shut the hell up about human rights. The country responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib has no moral authority to speak on human rights. The man who thinks the legal principle of habeas corpus, which allows people to challenge their imprisonment, is an impediment to justice and not an instrument of it doesn't get to lecture anyone on human rights.

Bush's address to the United Nations General Assembly was obviously meant for home consumption. No one sitting in that hall could possibly have taken him seriously.

That's what George W. Bush has done to the US. A nation that could once legitimately call itself a leader in the cause of freedom and justice in the world has now become a joke on those issues. For Bush to stand in front of those diplomats and scold many of them on their countries' human rights records is freakin' ridiculous and his message, which otherwise might've been helpful, held as much weight as the staple holding the pages of his speech together.

Bush himself has rendered his message entirely meaningless.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; propaganda; crime; When Bush spoke to the United Nations about human rights, they should've arrested him

Iran, the New Iraq

We're making progress with Iran. That's not a Bush administration talking point and by "we," I mean the international community -- minus the US. Iran, increasingly isolated in the world over it's nuclear research, is finding it hard to go it alone in the world. According to the United Nations, Iran is taking positive steps toward resolving what is at its core a diplomatic problem. The White House, not being huge fans of diplomacy, haven't really been making much progress. In fact, the Bush administration seems to be dedicated to further entrenching enemies.

While Bush is busy trying to freak everyone out over Iran, they're cooperating with the international community.

UN News Centre:

Iran has addressed the questions of the United Nations nuclear watchdog about its past plutonium programme and both parties now consider that matter resolved, according to a statement posted on the UN agency's website.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) yesterday published on its website the text [PDF] of a joint work plan on how to resolve outstanding issues between the agency and Iran after a request to do so from Tehran.

That text states that Iran provided clarifications to the IAEA to help explain all remaining questions it had about its plutonium programme, and that the agency agreed on 20 August that the matter has been resolved.

Don't get too excited. It's uranium that the Bush administration is freaking out about, not plutonium. So, as far as they're concerned, nothing has changed.

Despite the news, the president has decided that the level-headed, pragmatic approach to Iran is to scare the bejeezus out of everyone with nuclear weapons that even the administration admits are only hypothetical; as if 'may want nuclear weapons' and 'has the power to end the world' are the same thing.

Agence France-Presse:

US President George W. Bush branded the Islamic Republic "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism," citing its backing of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Shiite fighters killing US troops in Iraq.

"And Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," he told the American Legion veterans group [in Reno, NV].

It's a little late to worry about that, Israel's had nukes for decades -- the middle east is already "under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust" -- a reality the US has always pretended doesn't exist. If anyone turns the middle east into a big nuclear shooting gallery, it'll be the notoriously trigger happy israelis. That is, if the US doesn't beat them to it. There have been reports that the US is considering using "low yield" "tactical" nukes against Iran. In today's world, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would qualify as "low yield."

Meanwhile, it's not just US citizens Bush wants to get all freaked out, we're busy poking Iran with a stick.

CNN:

U.S. soldiers arrested members of an Iranian government delegation Tuesday at a hotel in Baghdad and took them to an unidentified location, Iran's official IRNA news agency reported.

[...]

The U.S. military said it detained some "Iranian citizens with Iranian passports" and their Iraqi escorts, who carried Iraqi Department of Energy badges, at a checkpoint in the Abu Nuwas market in eastern Baghdad's Rusafa district.

The Iranians and Iraqis were detained when "a group of individuals in several vehicles" stopped at the checkpoint, and "several occupants were observed to have weapons," the military said.

[...]

The number of people arrested was not immediately clear, though Associated Press Television showed U.S. soldiers escorting 10 blindfolded people -- their hands bound in front of them -- from the hotel into military vehicles and driving off.

If Iran had blindfolded and taken US personnel like that, the headlines here would be about "hostages." To a certain extent, those headlines would be correct. The iranian delegation was there at the invitation of the iraqi government and they were arrested on only the flimsiest of excuses. But the US doesn't take hostages, so these people are now "detainees."

So what's the deal here? Has the Iraq war worked out so well that we're now ready to roll into Iran? A british study from Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament tells us that it's pretty damned certain that the US has prepared for it.

Raw Story:

...Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a "full-spectrum approach," designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state." Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration's National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power...

I'd argue (and have) that eliminating Iran is the "War on Terror's" entire reason for being. As I said back in June, "...if you take a look at the map, it becomes pretty obvious that war with Iran was the plan all along. Afghanistan on one border and Iraq on the other puts Iran between two staging areas (with nominal ally in the 'war on terror,' Pakistan, also on the border). They're merely arguing for attacking Iran ahead of schedule."

Making progress with Iran means something different to the Bush administration than it does to anyone else. While the sane people consider "progress" as a process of moving away from war in Iran, Bushies consider war with Iran the goal we're progressing toward.

Which is why resolving issues between the IAEA and Iran means nothing in the White House. It's not a step in the right direction for them.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; diplomacy; neocon; Israel; for the Bush White House, the United Nations and the IAEA are only impediments to war with Iran

World Refugee Day

As holidays go, today isn't one of the fun ones. Today, June 20, is World Refugee Day. Around the world, people are displaced by genocide, famine, natural disaster, and war. Being a refugee is mainly a matter of bad luck on the part of person and poor planning on the part of the government. Hurricane Katrina showed us that anyone can become a refugee. But it's a problem that mostly haunts the poor.

This year wasn't an extremely good one for refugees. The United Nations tells us we're in a 'World Refugee Crisis,' with refugees up 14% from 2005 and no break in sight. They come from Darfur and Somalia and Afghanistan and Iraq and every refugee's story begins the same way -- something unimaginable happens, you grab the kids and whatever you can carry, and you run like hell. The only destination you have is 'away.' Often, you run from hell to a lesser hell -- hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of iraqis have found themselves in refugee camps in Iran.

In fact, the two crises driving this larger refugee crisis are ethnic cleansing in Sudan and the war in Iraq.

Reuters:

Iraq has emerged as the world's second most unstable country, behind Sudan, more than four years after President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, according to a survey released on Monday.

The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, economic, political and military indicators. Iraq ranked fourth last year.

Afghanistan, another war-torn country where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban insurgency nearly six years after a U.S.-led invasion, was in eighth place.

I've been calling Iraq a failed state for a long time. The government is an almost entirely diplomatic team, without any control whatsoever over what goes on in that country. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the war in Iraq alone has created 4.2 million displaced persons -- 2 million inside Iraq and the remainder in neighboring countries. These countries can't continue to take in refugees and are beginning to turn them away. In fact, theyre even being turned away inside Iraq. "Individual governorates inside Iraq are becoming overwhelmed by the needs of the displaced. At least 10 out of the 18 governates have closed their borders or are restricting access to new arrivals," says UNHCR spokesperson, Jennifer Pagonis. "UNHCR is receiving disturbing reports of regional authorities refusing to register new arrivals, including single women, and denying access to government services. Many displaced have been evicted from public buildings."

This leaves the internally displaced in shanty towns where the UNHCR says at least 47% -- nearly half -- have no access to official food distribution channels. Shortly after the war broke out, I remember seeing a news report on a displaced family. They were young, with a little toddler girl, and they were literally living under a rock out in the desert. That was the last time I remember seeing iraqi refugees on TV. I guess as global crises go, there's the telegenic and the untelegenic. I wonder if most people know that there are iraqi refugees at all.

But don't worry, Laura Bush is on it.

CNN's American Morning:

Q In fact, this is World Refugee Day at CNN, we've tried to highlight it -- 500 million people around the world, 400 million people around the world, having to flee their country for whatever reason. One that we're highlighting today also is the situation in Iraq -- people who were helping the Americans or even helping their own country, men and women, rebuild infrastructure, targeted. And they are also seeking refuge in other nations, as well as the United States.

MRS. BUSH: Sure, in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and then here. And I think Americans would be proud to know that we welcome to our country more refugees than all the rest of the nations combined. And obviously we're especially concerned about the Iraqi refugees, people who are there who are trying to build their government, trying to build a stable country, which is what our goal is, as well, who have left because of terror, really, because of the chance of violence and the fear of violence.

We welcome many of those refugees, both from Iraq and Afghanistan into the United States. We also spend about $80 million a year working with refugees, Iraqi refugees in the camps in Lebanon.

Yeah, they only have to make it across Africa -- including a trek across the Sahara -- then a brief swim in the Atlantic Ocean, and they're home free. I'm so proud... Allow me to refer back to an earlier post to give you an idea of what we're really doing for refugees:

...The [International] Herald Tribune tells us that the US State Department plans to spend $20 million on aiding refugees. Do the math; that's a little more than ten bucks per refugee for the internally displaced alone. That ought to go a long way.

We're big on creating refugees, but not so much on solving the problem. When I wrote that, there were 1.8 million internally displaced, now there's 2 million and spending hasn't increased. Not that it'd make much difference -- if we increased our spending in proportion to the growth of the population, we'd still be spending jack. Ten bucks per might last a day. I don't know where Laura Bush is getting the $80 million figure for Lebanon alone from, but I suspect it's from Karl Rove's butt.

A better idea of the concerns of the administration for iraqis struggling for their lives comes from the president himself.

60 Minutes:

Asked if he thinks he owes the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job, Bush says, "Well I don't, that we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?"

"Well, that the United States did not do a better job in providing security after the invasion?" [interviewer Scott] Pelley clarifies.

"Not at all. I think I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq," Bush replies.

That kid living under a rock in the desert is just a griper if she complains. The administration believes she's living the sweet life. Kind of explains the response to Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it?

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Afghanistan; Sudan; Darfur; genocide; disaster; Bush; UN; refugees; Can you really be said to 'celebrate' World Refugee Day?