- Well, the evidence just keeps accumulating. I think it
is a remarkable testimonial to President Bush's restraint that he has waited
this long.
-
- After reading Tony Blair's dossier on torture in Iraq,
the impulse to launch everything the Pentagon has must have been almost
irresistible.
-
- Imagine, torture taking place in a brutal dictatorship?
Good Lord, this comes as a shocking revelation.
-
- But perhaps the President was reminded of tens of thousands
tortured by America's friends, or by Americans themselves, in Iran or Chile
or Nicaragua or El Salvador or Vietnam when he paused, thinking a less-than-perfect
case had been made for sending millions of pounds of high explosives and
depleted uranium raining down on the people of Iraq.
-
- Perhaps he was reminded of the way that beacon of democracy
and human rights in the Middle East, Israel, has quietly tortured its captives
for half a century, and, in more than a few cases, outright murdered batches
of them.
-
- Or he may have recalled reports from Amnesty International
about the common brutality of American law enforcement. A prominent lawyer's
disgusting campaign to establish formal procedures for torture in America
may just have slowed his hand. Or it may have been thoughts of the abysmal
treatment of Afghan prisoners kept chained in Cuban cages, not to speak
of the way his brutish allies in Afghanistan were encouraged publicly by
the Secretary of Defense to murder prisoners en masse.
-
- But I doubt it. Bush is simply not a wimp when other
peoples' lives are concerned. He seems capable of sustaining his equilibrium
- with its quirky mix of being on a mission for God and nasty frat-boy
sense of humor - even in the face of great adversity, so long as it is
someone else's adversity.
-
- I'm sure his hand again started for the red phone when
he heard recent, damning reports on the evils of Islam, coming as they
did from such towering figures as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy
Swaggart. An outsider might be forgiven for regarding the good gentlemen's
remarks as something akin to theology lessons from the shriveled lips of
retired Imperial Wizards of the Klu Klux Klan.
-
- But the words of these men carry weight in several important
Bush constituencies including Beany Baby collectors, survivalists living
in abandoned Air Force missile silos stocked with tons of ammo and freeze-dried
rations, and folks who take their annual vacations watching cartoons and
shopping channels on satellite TV from recreational vehicles parked next
to the cinder-block splendor of a Wal-Mart.
-
- Jimmy Swaggart, for example, shares the President's character-building
experience as recovered reprobate, having had his rather arcane sexual
practices with a prostitute exposed in magazines some years ago. It was
the kind of publicity that hits the collection plate mighty hard. But old
Jimmy's a fighter. Equipped as he is with tear ducts capable of gushing
on command and an amazing rubbery face that mimics any known expression
of mock piety, once again he made the revival-tent crowds roar for more.
-
- Jimmy came back to collect again, just as the President
came back from his former, well-publicized life of rude, drunken abuse
and failure to do anything worthwhile - although some might argue he succeeded
only in removing the word drunken from the description. Still, in the President's
circle, people with such character credentials are regarded as authorities
when it comes to recognizing evil.
-
- And now, an amazing piece of evidence comes to light.
We have a previously-obscure reporter who knows someone at the FBI whose
second-cousin on his mother's side made an important discovery. A few years
back, in the course of taking rolls of souvenir snapshots of the smoldering
ruins at Oklahoma City, the second-cousin happened to spot a couple of
shady characters with moustaches.
-
- She knew instinctively they were shady, because they
didn't take one souvenir snapshot of the smoking destruction streaked with
blood. They just stood there talking and looking. Is that the way a real
American acts? Besides these guys just didn't look like real Americans.
-
- Well, just to be sure, she snapped a picture of them,
and, for a while, she kept it pinned to the big, pink, stuffed satin, heart-shaped
bulletin board over her bed, right next to her autographed picture of Lt.
Calley smiling in front of a burned-out hut in Vietnam. But eventually,
word got around the trailer park, and, sure enough, her cousin from the
FBI stopped by one day to ask for the picture.
-
- Everyone at the Bureau was convinced immediately that
the men in the snapshot were Iraqi agents - after all, the key to future
promotion in the Bureau today is one's ability to recognize such things
- and they've leaked their views to the press, just as they did in their
memorable struggles against Richard Jewel and Wen Ho Lee. Well, almost,
but this time the New York Times or the Atlanta Constitution weren't quite
so interested, so the FBI had to dig up an obscure reporter who needed
a break in life to become somebody. When they found a struggling, former
reporter for her high school yearbook at a faith healing in Altoona, Illinois,
they knew immediately they had the right person for the job of getting
the story out.
-
- This happy discovery also means America's own son, Tim
McVeigh, only did what he did under the insidious, all-reaching influence
of Iraqi agents, an innocent lamb led astray by agents of the Antichrist
who now strides the earth posing as the second Hitler - although there
appears to be a modest disagreement in Bush circles on this exact description
of Saddam Hussein since good old 'Rev' Falwell earlier proclaimed that
the Antichrist was in fact Jewish.
-
- The President is convinced he has the goods on Hussein.
Now, he just sits back to wait for a formal casus belli. He knows Hussein
will leave out a semicolon or mix a metaphor or give a pronoun an ambiguous
antecedent somewhere in his 12 thousand page document describing Iraq's
weapons' programs. After all, you can't expect a bunch of damn Arab peasants
to get such things right. And when the President's team of shrieking, fanatical
advisors finds the error, it will prove to the world that Hussein still
tries to hide the truth the President has always understood.
-
-
-
- John Chuckman encourages your comments: <mailto:jchuckman@YellowTimes.org>jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
-
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