December 11, 2008, Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?
Are we talking about Henry II "musing" out loud directly resulting the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Beckett... ? Or are we talking about former SecDef Rumsfeld (interviewed here (!)]... who is now the subject of a "better late than never" (no, actually, IMHO, better never than late... because this sort of thing allows members of Congress the pretense of misrepresenting that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving corporate-teat-sucking whores with less courage than the average coward)...
Where was I... oh yes... the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report blaming detainee abuses on Rumsfeld. Holy crap! YOU THINK?
For Christ's sake, the fother-mucker has been out of office for nearly two years (singlehandedly taking the fall for the GOP losses in the 2006 mid-term elections)... now... with barely 5 1/2 weeks left in the Bush Administration, the courageous members of the Armed Services Committee, who dare not say a word if it might mean they would be accused of being "soft on terrorism" or "not supporting the troops"... Anyway, now that there is a new sheriff in town, they have decided to suck up to the new boss.
You see, regular readers here have known about the pattern of American detainee abuses, and that this pattern was deliberately ordered BY THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF, at the insistence of the Vice President (via his chief enforcer and consigliori David Addington). Rumsfeld, though a good pal of Cheney and nominally in charge of the Defense Department that carried out many of the more prominent atrocities (that Rumsfeld and company had no problem blaming on "a few bad apple" NCO's), certainly has his share of responsibility, such as his direct personal interest in the torture of a detainee named Al Qahtani, for example.
But the idea, here, is that by focusing on one guy (an unpopular guy at that), that somehow, members of Congress can overlook their own roles as enablers of executive overreach and torture. The fact is, Congress, in concert with the corporate-whore media, is pretty much jointly responsible with the Bush Administration for the outrages of the last eight years. And I mean "bi-partisan" responsible, though one party, of course, was in the majority longer... they know who they are.
Still, I'm kind of disgusted that a Committee that includes such outrageous enablers of torture as McCain and Graham, who have added years of pointless detention and torture for hundreds of completely innocent men through their unConstitutional atrocities, like "the Detainee Treatment Act" and "the Military Commissions Act," have the audacity to blame anyone else for anything. But hey, that's just me.
Did I say that out loud?