By Chris Floyd - The Moscow Times June 11, 2003.
"The rule of law is dead.
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Holocaust revisionism took decades to rear its ugly head, but the whitewashers of war crimes in the Bush Regime are trying to pervert the facts of history mere weeks after their Leader triumphantly declared "mission accomplished" in the war on Iraq. "Weapons of mass destruction?" Never heard of 'em. Never mentioned 'em. Maybe we'll find some. Not that important. Time to move on. Hey, how about a tax cut?
But even as
revisionist-in-chief George W. Bush was staging his somber photo-op
in Auschwitz last week, the web of lies he and his little buddy Tony
Blair concocted to "justify" launching an act of military aggression
-- on the very Hitlerian grounds of "preventive war" -- was being
shredded by their own intelligence services. In an unprecedented
move, U.S and British spies went public to denounce the cartoonish
manipulation of professional intelligence data by the war-hungry
leaders. Reports of Saddam's "imminent threat" were "sexed up" on
Blair's order, said British spooks, while American agents said Bush
was spoon-fed a stew of uncorroborated confabulation by a "special
team" of ideological hatchet-men overseen by Pentagon honcho Don
Rumsfeld. Congressional and parliamentary probes are now afoot.
In the end, the "weapons of
mass destruction" that the Christian Coalition had sworn were "armed
and ready" to unleash unspeakable carnage on the world turned out to
be -- by Bush's own admission -- a couple of trucks, which contained
not a speck of hazardous material. Not exactly the fearsome arsenal
the Dear Leader had invoked, in ever-increasing detail, throughout
the long buildup to aggression. The actual CIA report that Bush
cited was even more -- or rather, less -- revealing, noting that the
trucks' designs were in fact consistent with their stated purpose:
the production of hydrogen for weather balloons, Slate.com reports.
Thus revisionism -- panicky, cynical, maladroit -- was the order of the day. Rumsfeld -- whose smirking rictus of iron certainty was a mainstay of the drive to war -- began backing off big-time. Maybe there weren't any WMD, he shrugged; maybe Saddam destroyed them before the war. Unfortunately, the British press dug up a quote from St. Tony himself on the subject: "We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." But to be fair, Blair's broadside was
fired long ago, practically in cave-man times: March 18, 2003, to be
exact. It's certainly irrelevant in our go-go modern world, where
history is written with water and each day is a new blank page.
So it was most apt that the
only question Bush was heard to ask during his Auschwitz tour
actually dealt with Holocaust revisionism: "Do people challenge the
accuracy of what you present?" he asked his guide, The New York
Times reports. This might seem a rather bizarre question at first
glance -- but then, Bush has a personal stake in the cultivation of
historical amnesia. His own family fortune was built in part by a
long and profitable collusion with the Nazis -- an ugly story oft
told here, and raked up again by Newsweek Poland during the
presidential visit.
Bush's grandfather, Prescott
Bush, and Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, helped
finance the rise of the Nazi Party through their intimate
entanglements with Nazi industrial, shipping and banking interests.
This long (and well-documented) collaboration continued even after
America was at war with Nazi Germany. It seems the blood money was
just too good to pass up -- even if it had to be dug out of the
corpses of young American soldiers and innocent civilians throughout
Europe and North Africa. The Walker-Bush cabal's Nazi partners also
helped finance -- then profited from -- the Auschwitz camp. Finally,
in 1942, the U.S. government seized the Walker-Bush Nazi assets
under the Trading With the Enemy Act. But the well-connected clan
managed to bury the news in the back pages: brief mentions of the
companies involved, but no names of the Establishment grandees
behind them. They also pulled strings to keep their American assets
from being seized as well, even though the profits from these
enterprises were inextricably mixed with their Nazi loot. Prescott
later cashed in these tainted assets for millions, a nest egg that
helped launch him into the Senate and his son and grandson into the
White House.
So perhaps George Walker Bush
felt uneasy treading on the bone-ash that lies beneath the soft,
green grass of Auschwitz. Or perhaps not. For quietly buried in the
back pages last week was news that the Walker-Bush tradition of war
profiteering carries on. A small brief in the Financial Times
revealed that Bush-connected "reconstruction" firms Halliburton and
Bechtel, now in control of Iraq's oil fields, want to raise massive
bank loans using future oil profits as collateral. In other words,
these Establishment grandees will pocket billions in free money that
will have to be paid back later by the Iraqi people, if and when
their oil fields are returned.
Both companies made millions with Saddam during the dictator's murderous heyday: Bechtel helped build Saddam's mustard-gas plants, while Halliburton, under Cheney, pocketed $73 million working with Saddam's UN-sanctioned regime after the first Gulf War. Meanwhile,
Halliburton -- which still pays Cheney a tidy annual sum -- was
handed yet another no-bid Iraq contract last week: $400 million in
government grease this time.
That's the way of the war
profiteers, these men of "honor and integrity" who build their
family fortunes, their corporate treasuries and their political
dynasties on bone-ash. The grass they tread is always soft.
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