Masters of Disaster: The Bush Gang Opens the Floodgates Again by Chris Floyd (SERE)

[Joanne98]

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/
Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 09 August 2007

At first glance, the Washington Post story seems to be a rather routine piece about a turf war between state officials and the federal government over disaster planning. But upon closer examination, it turns out to be a doorway into the dark, fetid heart of the Bush Regime’s hell. As the Post’s Spencer Hsu reports:

A decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation’s emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago.

State and local officials in charge of responding to disasters say that their input in shaping the National Response Plan was ignored in recent months by senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials, despite calls by congressional investigators for a shared overhaul of disaster planning in the United States…

Federal officials…appear to be trying to create a legalistic document to shield themselves from responsibility for future disasters and to shift blame to states, . “It seems that the Katrina federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness,” he said.

It’s just as disillusioned Bush appointee John DiIulio told us back in 2003 (before he was forced into a Stalinist-style recantation): There is no policy apparatus in the Bush Administration. There is no intent to actually govern the United States. There is only an authoritarian political machine dedicated to advancing its own agenda on behalf of a very narrow elite – and to covering its ass whenever the slightest inkling of its true nature gets out. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm,” DiIulio told Esquire’s Ron Suskind in the now-famous quote. “It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

Of course, Professor DiIulio is, to put it bluntly, an educated fool, who honestly believed Bush’s pre-election talk of “compassionate conservatism,” who believed that the president was a man of “good heart,” full of “respect and decency toward others.” The learned Theban didn’t seem to realize that even Ted Bundy could appear warm and caring when it suited his purpose; it’s a trait shared by many psychopaths and sociopaths, and by countless leaders down through the centuries who tended their roses and enjoyed fine music and petted their children while ordering death, torture, ruin and repression on a monstrous scale.

This monstrous nature is on vivid display in the Post story on the disaster plan. As the piece clearly shows, the Bush Administration simply doesn’t care how many American citizens suffer and die – from natural disasters, from collapsing infrastructure, from lack of health care, from military aggression and the terrorism it engenders. The Bushists are willing to do whatever it takes to get their way – no matter what the cost in someone else’s blood and anguish.

The disaster plan double-dealing is of course just one more stream feeding the flood of moral corruption that’s drowning us. The waters seem to be rising faster than ever in recent weeks; to read the news every day is like taking blow after blow in the face — every hour a new outrage, or an old outrage refreshed and extended. The FISA debacle, the Justice Department scandals (political prosecutions, goon-squad raids on truth-tellers, etc.), the demented nuclear saber-rattling by Democratic candidates, the alarming spread of militant Christian extremism through the U.S. military under official auspices, the continuing war crime of air attacks on civilian centers in Iraq…and hanging over it all this week, the Dantean journey through the Bush Gulag in “The Black Site,” Jane Meyer’s landmark New Yorker piece (well-limned here by Scott Horton, whom I drew heavily upon in the above listing.)

For those who have been following and chronicling the rise of the gulag since its inception (back in the days when its instigators and practitioners were still happy to brag to cheerleading newspapers about “taking the gloves off” and going to “the dark side”), there is not a lot that is new in Mayer’s piece. But she has brought it all together with devastating thoroughness and clarity.

Mayer mentions tellingly — but briefly — one key aspect of Bush’s torture chambers that has been largely overlooked: the key role played by a couple of psychologists in drawing up the sinister regimen (which was also based in part on KGB practices): CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mark Benjamin of Salon has much more on this pair, who devoted their clinical skills to devising ways to destroy a captive’s mind — in the somewhat bizarre conviction that a destroyed mind can somehow produce useful intelligence. (Benjamin in turn drew on a 2005 piece by Mayer about Mitchell and the Bush Regime’s Mengelean use of medical personnel in interrogations.)

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Continued…http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

[Demeter]

1. They Do It To Shrink Government

so we can all drown in our own bathtubs, or something like that.