"Kill them." Gen. Sanchez's memoirs contain a transcript from a bloodthirsty private speech by Bush.

[marmar]

Edited by OP to add the link to the article


From TomDispatch, via AlterNet:



Shocking Bush 'Pep Talk' to His War Cabinet on Iraq: 'We Are Going to Wipe Them out!'

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 1, 2008.

"Kill them." Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's memoirs contain a transcript from a bloodthirsty and over the top private speech by Bush.




Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York's Times Square -- one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B-westerns or war movies. We were catching some old oater which, as I recall, began with a stagecoach careening dramatically down the main street of a cow town. A wounded man is slumped in the driver's seat, the horses running wild. Suddenly -- perhaps from the town's newspaper office -- a cowboy dressed in white and in a white Stetson rushes out, leaps on the team of horses, stops the stagecoach, and says to the driver: "Sam, Sam, who dun it to ya?" (or the equivalent). At just that moment, the camera catches a man, dressed all in black in a black hat -- and undoubtedly mustachioed -- skulking into the saloon.

My dad promptly turns to me and whispers: "He's the one. He did it."

Believe me, I'm awed. All I can say in wonder and protest is: "Dad, how can you know? How can you know?"

But, of course, he did know and, within a year or two, I certainly had the same simple code of good and evil, hero and villain, under my belt. It wasn't a mistake I was likely to make twice.

Above all, of course, you couldn't mistake the bad guys of those old films. They looked evil. If they were "natives," they also made no bones about what they were going to do to the white hats, or, in the case of Gunga Din (1939), the pith helmets. "Rise, our new-made brothers," the evil "guru" of that film tells his followers. "Rise and kill. Kill, lest you be killed yourselves. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!"

"Wipe Them Out!"

Kill! Kill! Kill! That was just the sort of thing the native equivalent of the black hat was likely to say. Such villains -- for a modern reprise, see the latest cartoon superhero blockbuster, Iron Man -- were not only fanatical, but usually at the very edge of mad as well. And their language reflected that.

I was brought back with a start to just such evil-doers of my American screen childhood last week by a memoir from a once-upon-a-time insider of the Bush presidency. No, not former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who swept into the headlines by accusing the President of using "propaganda" and the "complicit enablers" of the media to take the U.S. to war in 2002-2003. I'm thinking of another insider, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. He got next to no attention for a presidential outburst he recorded in his memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story, so bloodthirsty and cartoonish that it should have caught the attention of the nation -- and so eerily in character, given the last years of presidential behavior, that you know it has to be on the money. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/86890/

[acmavm]

1. How can people square bush**s obvious personality and mental

defects with his claims of being a 'compassionate Christian'? He's never shown one Christ-like trait in his life. Quite the contrary, he's shown that he's anything but.

[KharmaTrain]

2. Here's Hoping This Is A Future Transcript

For a war crimes trial. I'm not sure Sanchez should be up in the dock with the rest of the criminals, but I'd sure like him to recite what you've posted in open court with the world watching and boooshie, cheney, von rumsfeld and all the other war-mongers in the dock.

[OnceUponTimeOnTheNet]

3. K&R

[Maraya1969]

4. Here is the full transcript of what bush said

Not long after that, the President "launched" what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as "a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign ." Here then is that "pep talk." While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the President's -- and my -- childhood:

"'Kick ass!' said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. 'If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

Keep in mind that the bloodlusty rhetoric of this "pep talk" wasn't meant to rev up Marines heading into battle. These were the President's well-embunkered top advisors in a strategy session on the eve of major military offensives in Iraq. Evidently, however, the President was intent on imitating George C. Scott playing General George Patton -- or perhaps even inadvertently channeling one of the evil villains of his onscreen childhood.

[momster]

5. Godwin or no Godwin,

you can really only compare this to the screaming Hitler did as the Russians moved in on Berlin. Delusional, unwilling to realize the enormity of his folly, urging his generals/cooks/imaginary friends to never surrender. He's beyond aid at this point...