Who is Alberto Gonzales?
You may be wondering, "Who is this Alberto Gonzales that Bush has picked to be the next Attorney General?"
Just follow my handy chart:
posted by Luke Francl @ 10:59 PM |
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11/11/2004 |
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18 Comments:
Is anyone coordinating a letter writing campaign to the various state senators asking them to not allow this nomination to pass? If not - there should be a campaign.
He's Iraqi? I thought he was hispanic.
Yeah, I think the formula needs a " ---> " rather than a " = ".
Unless that's an illustration of what the congressional confirmation process might be like.
Not to post off topic but how about the news on the economy, Jobs, Stock market, Even in Minnesota things are not as bleak as we have been made to believe. This news has got to be killing you guys. And I don't mean this as a smartass comment, I truly believe this is bad news for you'all. I think you have wallowed in your own stink for so long you can't possibly see beyond the smell.
You'll have to forgive us for worrying about the fact that our healthcare premiums have been rising steadily and our benefits have been dropping just as quickly. Perhaps we're thinking too much about the notion that the "new jobs" aren't nearly as good as the jobs that have been lost. My company hasn't been able to give anyone a pay raise in over three years, our executives have taken a 10% pay cut and we've watched a number of our competitors go out of business. Sorry I don't share your rosy outlook.
ryan
Perhaps you should change industries or jobs?
Got to admit I agree with you here, Gonzalez is a piss-poor excuse for a torturer.
The best he can do is to have prisoners standing around in garbage bags looking stupid or make naked man pyramids...while al-Zarkawi and his gettin'-it-done crew saw off people's heads with a dull knife?
What a dink.
Hey, how about crafting an al-Zarkawi chart? If nothing else it would accent the colors of your blog template really nicely.
Swiftee, as an American I hope you are deeply ashamed of what went down in Abu Ghraib. It's a stain on the honor of this country. I'll stop right there because I can barely contain my anger at your comment.
Al-Zarqawi is a despicable man and the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad are a gang of vile, inhuman thugs of the first order; I don't think anyone here disputes that.
That said, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Please elaborate.
Oh, you're really, really pissed off because a few of our troops humiliated and scared prisioners of war.
Here's a clue for you and everyone else that's so anxious to smear the United States:
The knuckleheads who were responsible were convicted of crimes and are spending between 4 and eight years in Leavenworth.
In case you're still confused (ha!), that would mean that they broke the law.
Oh, by the way. Not a single one of them implicated Gonzales in any way, shape or form and the two who started out claiming that they were "directed to soften them up" by the CIA admitted that was nothing more than a good story meant to cover their asses.
Speaking of being pissed off.
I must have missed the part where any of you moonbats raised a single objection, or took any notice what-so-ever to the fact that the animals we are sending to Allah like to kidnap unarmed civilians, tie them up and saw their fucking heads off with knives.
Yea, yea I know, they had it coming right?
But wait.
I forgot something that's sure to get you goofballs riled up. They shoot female prisoners in the head rather than use the knife...because they are women.
It seems that in addition to their taste for butchery (inappropriate at the least wouldn't you agree), these animals guilty of (gasp) gender bias!
Now let's hang em!!
As an American, I hold myself and my country to a higher standard than terrorists.
Most of the people at Abu Ghraib were innocent. Some of them were little boys who were sexually abused. Is it OK because raping someone with a light stick is not as bad as cutting off their head? NO!
Abu Ghraib is a national disgrace, a violation of the Geneva Conventions that PROTECT OUR SOLDIERS, and a propaganda victory for Islamic radicals. It greatly disturbs me that you're not bothered by it.
The worst of it is that violating the Geneva Conventions makes our troops targets for torture.
Why do you hate our troops, Swiftee?
Luke you are so full of shit I can smell your breath over the internet.
How the fuck do you, Like Francl, come to know that "most of the people at Abu Ghraib were innocent"? Because you read some bullshit on indymedia? Or because Michael Moore, or P-Diddy or some other mouth-breathing moron told you so?
You don't know shit.
You think that our guys have nothing better to do over there than snag "innocent little boys" off the street? Get your head out of your ass boy.
Abu Ghraib isn't a national disgrace moonbat, because we as a nation condemned, in no uncertain terms, what those idiots pulled and jailed them. End of story.
And you bet your tinfoil hat that what they did, for no compelling reason, pisses me off. Those idiots put their fellow troopers in a worse position than they were already in.
But I'll tell ya something sport, if I thought that someone knew where I could find the animals that did this I would drive a semi truck up his ass to get that information
You young morons are so intent on finding someone to hang your pissy little tantrums on you have completely lost any sense of graciousness towards the very men and women who protect your right to make public buffoons of yourselves.
Hate the troops? Fuck you boy, I AM the troops.
It's always refreshing to catch the wafts of Swiftee's lily-sweet breath of pure reason. Thank you Swiftee! But can I add some on-topic information before you commandeer that ass-truck, or post your next Preparation-H-scented comment? The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions are intended to prohibit the sorts of abuses that went on at Abu Ghraib. Whether or not the prisoners were innocent is irrelevant: the abuses were illegal and inhumane.
Alberto Gonzales wrote an infamous memo which suggested that we no longer need to adhere to the Geneva Conventions, and that torture would therefore be allowable under current circumstances. Thus, to Gonzales, what went on at Abu Ghraib could be legal and a useful information-gathering method. This was the point of Luke's post.
You might also find it interesting, since you are "the troops", that the Bush cabinet's most honorable soldier, Colin Powell, was outraged by the idea of discarding the Geneva Conventions, and wrote this response to the Gonzales memo.
Facts? Swiftee has no use for those... all he needs is balls. Why, I'd be willing to bet Swiftee's camouflaged balls weigh 50 pounds each. Impressive. Too bad they suck valuable nourishment from his starving brain.
On the lighter side (and boy do we need a lighter side....):
Dubya the Movie
Decaf9,
I'm not suggesting the terrorists follow the Geneva conventions, nor does anyone think they would. But by not following the Geneva conventions, the US sets the standards for the way its POWs could be treated in our next "ordinary" conflict (also, do note that Iraq is governed by the Geneva Conventions because we invaded a sovereign nation. It's not a "war on terrorists" a la Afghanistan.
Also, several people died at Abu Gharib under shady circumstances -- they were then hidden from the Red Cross. So it's not just a matter of humiliation. People died there.
Swiftee, pull your head out of your ass and smell the sweet air of reality.
The Red Cross says 70-90% of Iraqi detainees were innocent, arrested by mistake. They were tortured because they wouldn't talk about the insurgency...because they didn't have anything to do with it!
Think about that next time you're defending the torture of children in front of their parents.
Oh, I forgot this part:
Swiftee: "Abu Ghraib isn't a national disgrace moonbat, because we as a nation condemned, in no uncertain terms, what those idiots pulled and jailed them. End of story."
Yeah, except for the commander of the prison, who got off with a slap on the wrist, and the commander of Iraq's prison system who is slated for a promotion.
There were clearly institutional problems at Abu Gharib, but the Bush administration whitewashed them and leveled blame at the lowest levels possible to contain political damage.
Just another example of the Bush administration's "The Buck stops where?" policy.
The right wing response that Abu Ghraib was the result of the actions of "few bad apples" falls far short of the truth. I acknowledge, that, once the seriousness of the activity became known, the government got to the bottom of the situation and dealt with it accordingly. The problem was, they didn't get to the top of it. Abu Ghraib resulted from a failure of leadership. That failure started with the President, ran to Rumsfeld produced the Gonzalez memo, which justified the activities at Abu Ghraib - and other places I might add. When Enron went bad, we didn't blame the janitor.
Abu Ghraib's legacy of disgrace is twofold. There is the disgrace of the United States abandoning its principles to dive into the gutter to engage in torture. And there is the equal disgrace of the ham-fisted strategery that resulted in the largest public relations disaster in US history: The picture that Luke posted of an anonymous prisoner being tortured by the United States taken from the very same rooms Saddam used to torture his victims. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
The beheading of coalition prisoners by maniacs is not connected to atrocities at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere. There is no excuse for the systematic abuse of the very people we are trying to liberate. We cannot legitimately claim the moral high ground if we do not truly occupy it. Torturing mistakenly arrested prisoners, as was documented in theh above referenced Red Cross Report on prison abuses in occupied Iraq, means that we automatically abandon the high ground. It means we have met the enemy, and he is us. We cannot use an unrelated act of violence to exonerate ourselves.
It might also be tempting, at least to those on the right, to point to beheadings and blame the messenger - The media and whining liberals and their "anti-american" agenda". Some have said that the grisly deaths were/are abetted by the So Called Liberal Media and the traitors on the left that continue to make hay over Abu Grahib. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said: "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment." But this would be a mistake. In this case, the media is performing a valuable service. It is holding up the mirror and showing us the road to hell we are in the process of paving. Unless those on the right and the left equally deplore the treatment of prisoners, while being grateful for the transparency that allows us to examine it as a nation, we may yet finsh the job.
PS to Swiftee-- I am "the troops" too. We all are, everyone of us.
Well said, Chris. That would be well put as a main page post.
Chris, you are an american citizen. Troops sacrifice their families, there own selfish wants and needs, and thier safety for all of us. What the fuck have you sacrificed for anyone you piece of shit. Don't ever compare yourself with a soldier, you couldn't carry thier water.
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