The jury’s decision yesterday to give wannabe terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui life in prison instead of the death penalty was a public relations disaster for the Bush Administration. They needed a kill in the case in order to show progress in ridding the world of evildoers, but the jury heard convincing evidence that Moussaoui was shunted aside by al Qaeda big wigs well before 9/11 because he was a mentally deranged loose cannon.

Moussaoui was small fry but the administration has two of al Qaeda’s top leaders in custody and while it might seem obvious that they could salvage something out of the Moussaoui disaster by trying, convicting and frying the genuine coup plotters, it ain’t gonna happen.

Yesterday on CNN, terrorism expert Peter Bergen explained that the high-ranking terrorists will never be tried in a court of law because the Bush team permanently tainted any testimony they might provide by subjecting them to torture:

BERGEN: [The] real tragedy here is that I think it’s very unlikely that the people really responsible for 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and [Ramzi Binalshibh], who were the operational planners, it was their idea, their execution. They’re in American custody, and I don’t think they’re ever going to see the inside of an American courtroom. I think most Americans would be surprised by that. Why will they not see inside an American courtroom? Very possibly because [they’ve been] treated in such a way that their evidence would be inadmissible. The “New York Times” said that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being water [boarded], which is a technique somewhere between abuse and torture, where you make somebody — you put somebody’s head into the water and you make them think they’re drowning.

In the Los Angeles Times this morning, Clinton terrorism expert Michael Greenberger, who is now a University of Maryland law professor, agreed:

“They cannot be prosecuted because of the way they have been interrogated,” said [Greenberger]. “They have been subjected to very aggressive questioning, and any statements they made now can’t be used against them.”

An open trial for the Al Qaeda leaders could reveal that U.S. agents used harsh methods, even torture, to extract information, he added.

“That has been the irony of the Moussaoui case from the beginning. We have prosecuted a marginal character who appeared unmoored from reality, while the real planners of the crime will not be brought before justice in the United States,” Greenberger said.

Is there anything about the so-called War on Terror that this gang has not screwed up?

Hat Tip to JR

Was it only three years ago?

Update by Trish: Sometimes the words “outrage” and “indignation” seem so inadequate. Read what the lying liar said for yourself.

ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN (CNN) — The following is an unedited transcript of President Bush’s historic speech from the flight deck of the USS Lincoln, during which he declared an end to major combat in Iraq:

And tonight, I have a special word for Secretary Rumsfeld…America is grateful for a job well done…The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless…we have seen the turning of the tide.

Thank you. Thank you all very much.

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country. […]

I wouldn’t blame Colin Powell if he wrote a big tell-all book dishing dirt about his time as George W. Bush’s Secretary of State. He might as well cash in because his once-vaunted reputation has been permanently besmirched by his association with the president and his men. He kept quiet while the civilian leadership — Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld and others — went to war with misguided and tragically faulty plans.

Powell broke his silence on the pre-war incompetence and malfeasance today on British television:

POWELL: I have always been one who favored a larger military presence in an operation to make sure that you can deal with the unforeseen, but in the case of the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, you had institutions being destroyed, you had ministries being burned down, and I have said on many occasions I don’t think we had enough force there at that time to impose order. That’s what we were responsible for, because when you have taken out a government, a regime, then you become responsible for the country.

[snip]

POWELL: I made the case to General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld before the president though that it [sic] was not sure we had enough troops, and so the case was made. It was listened to. It was considered. And those responsible for the troop levels, Mr Rumsfeld and General Franks, and the joint chiefs of staff, which include the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, believed they had the appropriate troop level.

So this guy spent $2 million to get $8.6 million, and now he faces 40 years:

Philip Bloom, a U.S. businessman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery and money laundering in connection with a bid-rigging probe of Iraq reconstruction contracts.

The Justice Department unsealed the plea agreement today in federal court in Washington. Bloom admitted paying a former comptroller for the disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority and other officials more than $2 million in money and gifts to win $8.6 million in contracts.

Bloom faces up to 40 years in prison and a $750,000 fine. Under the terms of the plea agreement, he also must pay $3.6 million in restitution and forfeit $3.6 million in assets to the U.S., the Justice Department said.

The magnitude of the corruption by our outsourced government in Iraq is finally coming to light:

Piece by piece, Halliburton over here, a corrupt company over there, we have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American firms in the reconstruction of Iraq. Last weekend, a Globe story connected some of the dots of corruption. Of $20.7 billion in Iraqi bank accounts and oil revenues seized by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the US-led invasion of Iraq, $14 billion was given out for reconstruction but tens of millions of dollars were unaccounted for. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation.

As the columnist summed it up: “This is robbery, not reconstruction.”

If President Bush were to retire Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, would Rummy’s replacement be any better? Whoever is there is going to have to deal with Vice President Cheney.

Still, the Ostroy Report lays out a convincing bill of particulars against the two-time Secretary of Defense:

Rumsfeld is an arrogant, bullying micromanager who grossly miscalculated strategy in Iraq while ignoring and/or discounting the advice of the military commanders on the ground. Even one of his staunchest supporters, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, in a NY Times op-ed Sunday, admitted Rumsfeld is a micromanager who wanted to be involved in all decisions. As such, several of his strategic decisions have come under intense scrutiny from the generals. First, Rummy’s “modern war” premise grossly underestimated the level of troops needed despite strong opposition from Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was later booted from his post for stating that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were needed to maintain order post-invasion. Furthermore, it was Rumsfeld who decided to cancel the deployment of the First Cavalry Division, which would’ve bolstered the initial invasion force and helped stave off the mounting insurgency. And perhaps the biggest blunder was Rumsfeld’s unilateral decision to dissolve the Iraqi military without consulting the Joint Chiefs.

Poodle no more: Like President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has seen his poll numbers drop as the Iraq War and its pretexts have unraveled. In fact, Blair’s approval rating is even lower than the president’s. Just over 30 percent approve of Blair’s job performance, while Bush’s popularity hovers around 37 percent. In one poll, 57 percent agreed that “Blair had run out of steam and is unlikely to achieve anything else as prime minister.” Nearly half said they wanted Blair to resign this year.

Now Blair, whose slavishness as a helpmate to President Bush during the Iraq war earned him the sobriquet “Bush’s poodle,” is deserting the president over his new scheme to rally popularity for himself and his party in the mid-terms by a-bombing some sense into the Iranian mullahs:

Tony Blair has told George Bush that Britain cannot offer military support to any strike on Iran, regardless of whether the move wins the backing of the international community, government sources claimed yesterday…

[In] the midst of international opposition to a pre-emptive strike on Tehran, and Britain’s military commitments around the world, the government maintains it cannot contribute to a military assault. “We will support the diplomatic moves, at best,” a Foreign Office source told Scotland on Sunday. “But we cannot commit our own resources to a military strike.”

Meanwhile, a new report on the Iran crisis has warned that neo-conservatives in the Bush administration are on “collision course” with Tehran.

MUST SEE VIDEO
Watch the video here.

Smart bomb: John Callahan is a guy with no small amount of video editing talent and a lot on his mind. He has put together a remix of John Lennon’s classic peace anthem, “Imagine,” pieced together from 40 video clips of George Bush’s speeches and public utterances, interspersed with disturbing images of war and destruction from Iraq.

This is not your cutesie animation of George and Dick singing and dancing to illustrate a petty political point — it’s juiced-up anti-war rhetoric with a punch.

Fort Iraq: On April 2, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski appeared on C-Span’s “Q&A,” and gave a long and very frank interview about her 20-year military career, her work at the Pentagon and the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Besides very clearly articulating her reasons for opposing the war, Kwiatkowski did a good job of connecting the dots between neoconservatism, the military-industrial complex and the administration’s rush to war.

She also said the U.S. is in Iraq to stay:

I think, for guys like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, a lot of the neoconservatives, even George W. Bush and certainly Cheney, the vision is that we are not really a republic anymore. We’re certainly not a limited state. We are the world’s most important and all-powerful state, and that we have certain rights. Yes, we have certain responsibilities, but I think the rights are what drive them. And those rights include the right to do what we want, to get what we need, to have what we want to have.

I think that’s what it is and, you know, we’ve built very massive mega-bases, permanent. These are permanent military bases in Iraq. We’ve done that in other places, as well, in the Middle East, but certainly these — this construction project in Iraq — in fact most of the [reconstruction] money has been for military construction of [facilities] for our use. I think that’s a big part of it, shifting our footprint.

‘We’ve built the bases, and we’re not leaving Iraq.’
— Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski

And certainly, even long before George W. Bush, the Pentagon has been interested in, from a global perspective, shifting and reshaping our global military footprint, and Mesopotamia is just absolutely, you know, wonderful. It is the most strategic location. I don’t care if you’re talking about water, trade routes, oil, our neighbors, our friends, people that may be threats in the future that we want to leverage. Iraq is perfect for all those things. And so, from their perspective, from the neoconservative perspective, there is this geopolitical reshaping that needs to go on, and Iraq is part of that. And so, we make the decision and we do the thing, and we did the thing. And we’ve built the bases, and we’re not leaving Iraq for the, you know, for all that.

Now, there is the kind of universal value-driven issue with the neo-conservatives about global democracy and that everyone has a right to self-government, but that to me seems very, very superficial because, certainly, you look at our allies, and of course this has been brought up numerous times. But, I mean, the friends that we have are those that do what we say, and if they’re Saudis or if they’re guys like Musharraf, who conducted a military coup, or other people that are less than savory and they’re not Democrats, that’s OK if they do what we need to do.