Another socialist blog

NPR has an interview with the Army chaplain who served at Guantanamo, and who was wrongly accused of espionage. Former Capt. James Yee has written a book about his ordeal, which included 76 days in solitary confinement. He was released and given an honorable discharge, but no apology.

Yee gives further confirmation to the Koran desecration story that got Newsweek in so much trouble. You will recall how conservatives insisted that the story of the Koran being flushed down toilets was obviously false, because you can’t get a big fat book to flush down a toilet. Yee, an eyewitness to the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, explains that if you were at Camp Xray, you didn’t have a flush toilet, you had a bucket. Throwing the Koran in the shit bucket isn’t particularly difficult, if you’re already disposed to torture people. I guess conservatives don’t think much about what it’s really like to be a prisoner of the United States government.

George W. Bush started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because God told him to do it, in Bush’s own words.

“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God,’ ” said Nabil Shaath, who was the Palestinian foreign minister at the time of a top-level meeting with Bush in June 2003. Mahmoud Abbas, then Palestinian prime minister and now the Palestinian Authority president, was also present for the conversation with Bush.

“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …’ And I did.”

No wonder he used the word “crusade” to describe his plans. I wonder if God personally approved the torture and murder of prisoners, too.