Hypocrisy in Action

I've been wondering just what the Bush administration would do in the wake of the recent Palestinian elections. How to promote democracy as an ideal, yet reject it in its practical application, is the latest nuancing challenge facing our president.

Apparently, Israel wants to withhold $50M due the Palestinians from customs and tax revenue. They plan to starve the Palestinian economy until Hamas steps down, I guess. Jimmy Carter thinks that would amount to punishing the Palestinian people for their choice in governments, and he thinks that's wrong. He believes democracy requires that the Palestinian people choose their government officials, by election, even if the end result of said election is that the leadership of the United States and/or Israel are forced to work with people they don't like. As we might expect, President Bush does not see it the way Jimmy Carter does. He is siding with Israel and has given his Secretary of State the job of assisting them in applying sanctions that could lead to widespread poverty and devastation in the occupied territory.

Condi Rice has been hitting the trail in Europe for the purpose of touting the importance of refusing financial aid to the Palestinians. Her rationale: they are now being led by people who promote violence to solve problems; we can't work with terrorists. Meanwhile, the country we invaded to solve our own strange set of problems, including our addiction to oil is still steeped in so much violence that it is essentially experiencing a civil war.

And even as Iraq is struggling for the security and freedom we failed to provide to them, despite our self-proclaimed status as liberators, our President is using his yearly State of the Union address to scold us for our addiction to oil. It's the ultimate marriage of irony and hypocrisy that a Texas oil man is scolding Americans for being dependent on oil. In what alternative universe does the pusher have a right to lecture the addict?

But the biggest hypocrisy/irony (I'll have to invent a word for that: hypirony, perhaps?) is that the information we got from Bush's decision to by-pass the Geneva Conventions and allow torture--information that purportedly proved Saddam Hussein had WMDs--as well as the torture scandals at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and elsewhere, now show us quite clearly that the only way the Bush administration could have been so misled about their intelligence, was if they tortured people until those people told their torturers what they wanted to hear. In other words, if our interrogators followed known CIA interrogation methods that were tested over decades and proven to be effective, the Bush administration could not have gotten the information they wanted. That's why they changed the rules.

They had a plan. They needed evidence to support it. They tortured people until they got the evidence they needed. That's the way that game played out. For all the evidence to back up this assertion, just check out the http://www.democracynow.org/ website. They have several programs on this. In addition, LinkTV aired a special on Abu Ghraib that will provide as much information as any sane person can tolerate regarding all of the above.

The very program the administration says is protecting us from future terror attacks generated the misinformation that got us into an unnecessary war and has since caused violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike to increase rather than subside.

I don't see how there can be any doubt that this was planned and executed to fill the needs of an elite group of people, mostly men, who deliberately manipulated information and evidence in order to support their desired outcome. This is nothing short of conspiracy. There is only one question left: At what point will the American people care enough to stop it?