by James Glaser
November 17, 2005

Two weeks ago George Bush was telling the world, "We don't torture." Billions of people the world over have seen the photos of what Americans did to the Iraqi suspects we had in prison. Millions have seen the wire cages we keep suspects in down in Cuba. The world knows we torture, heck there is no hiding that fact, but President Bush, with a straight face can keep on saying we don't.

Last week the Washington Post came out with a report about the prisons the Bush Administration has set up around the world, so we can hold people in secret, and if we torture... who will know? The Republican politicians were upset about the leaking of the report about those prisons, but there was hardly a word said about how wrong those prisons are. Today John McCain said he knew about them two years ago, but he said nothing.

An independent film crew from Italy did a documentary on America's military using chemical weapons in Iraq, and both the Pentagon and the White House vehemently deigned it, saying that white phosphorus was only used for illumination. This week we get a new story. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable said, "It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants."

Col. Venable denied white phosphorous constituted a banned chemical weapon, and he could do that because our country would not sign the international treaty restricting the use of the substance against civilians.

George Bush used the threat of chemical weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein as a reason to go to war, and now he uses a technicality to say that our chemical weapons are indeed chemical weapons, but we never agreed to not use them.

Another reason the White House used to attack Iraq was Saddam's torturing of his own people. Today we find out about a raid on Iraq's new government, and how American troops had to rescue 175 people held in an Iraqi government "dungeon." The British Independent writes, "People are arrested and disappear for months. Bodies appear every week of men and sometimes women, executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have been grotesquely mutilated with knives and electric drills before their deaths."

The Bush Administration keeps telling us how things are so much better now in Iraq. After American troops rescued these people, General Karl Horst said that the prisoners were "in need of medical help." The Iraqis were more honest and said, "These men were in a very bad way. They have obviously been tortured, some had been there a long time and were very frightened. The officer who said that called himself Yasin and would give no other name, because as he said, "I don't want to end up in one of these myself."

Washington and the Bush administration constantly lie to us and the world, and they keep getting caught, but as Joseph Goebbles, Hitler's propaganda minister said in Nazi Germany, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep telling it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such a time as the State can shield the people from political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

The truth about how George Bush got us into his war in Iraq is coming out, along with other truths, like the fact that we do use chemical weapons, and we do torture people. George will go right on lying until the end, but the truth will win out and not only destroy Bush's Presidency, but the truth will give us back our country.