Jackson Free Press

Nothing like supporting our troops. Salon reports:

Appearing on the Today show to set us all straight over these missing explosives in Iraq, Rudy exculpated George W. Bush and found a different scapegoat -- this will be very familiar to those of you who paid attention to the Abu Ghraib scandal -- the troops. "No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?" Giuliani said, while also arguing there was a good chance the explosives were gone when soldiers arrived. But still, even if the explosives were gone, using Rudy's logic, if the troops "searched carefully enough," they would have known. Not only does this not square with what we know about the U.S. troops who stopped at al Qaqaa right after the fall of Baghdad, that they literally stopped there, and in the words of the commander in the field: "We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission." But Giuliani's finger-pointing at the soldiers looks an awful lot like what Bush wrongly accused Kerry of doing yesterday -- "denigrating the troops."

In the kind of rapid fire response the Clintonistas working for Kerry have honed to a science by now, Joe Lockhart sent this rebuttal to reporters before the Today show was even off the air: "This is just the latest example of the excuse presidency where the buck stops any place but the Oval Office." Soon after, the Today show clip appeared on the Kerry campaign Web site.

Previous Commentsshow

Speaking of passing the buck, remember Abu Ghraib. The New York Times editorial today: When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal first broke, the Bush administration struck a pose of righteous indignation. It assured the world that the problem was limited to one block of one prison, that the United States would never condone the atrocities we saw in those terrible photos, that it would punish those responsible for any abuse - regardless of their rank - and that it was committed to defending the Geneva Conventions and the rights of prisoners. None of this appears to be true. The Army has prosecuted a few low-ranking soldiers and rebuked a Reserve officer or two, but exonerated the top generals. No political leader is being held accountable for the policies set in Washington that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other prison camps operated by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guant·namo Bay, Cuba, where prisoner abuse was systemic. And we've learned that the administration's respect for the Geneva Conventions, which some senior officials openly disdain as an antiquated nuisance, is highly conditional. The Times's Tim Golden documented this week the way the Bush administration secretly created a parallel - and unconstitutional - judicial universe for Gitmo. The White House was so determined to suspend the normal rights and processes for the hundreds of men captured in Afghanistan - none of them important members of Al Qaeda and most of them no threat at all - that it hid the details from Secretary of State Colin Powell and never bothered to consult Congress. [...] This happened in secret, at the same time that administration officials were testifying at the Senate's Abu Ghraib hearings about the president's allegiance to the Geneva Conventions and to American constitutional values when it came to the treatment of prisoners. The gap between the administration's public statements and private actions is enormous. [...] This issue has barely been discussed by Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry, but the country needs answers and public accountability. Now, who was it talking about communist tactics of squelching freedom on another thread? Grrrr. The country I love doesn't do this crap. We've got to take it back.

DonnaLadd

Oct 28 2004

This kind of thing, along with the 'troop revolt' make me wonder what all those "support our troops" tags really mean for the people who have them. The Guliani thing is extraordinarily humorous, after listening to clips on the radio of Kerry clearly putting the blame at Bush's feet, then Bush saying Kerry is dissing the troops on this one. Looks like Guliani got the wrong memo on Talking Points.

kate

Oct 29 2004