Nothing like a celebrity trial to distract people from their problems. Apparently, that's the latest strategy from the Bush regime's puppet administration in Baghdad.

Or is the puppet really Chucky? Subduing Iraq was going to be child's play, according to the smug predictions by Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush's handlers told him to declare in May 2003, "Mission accomplished."

Summer heat, no electricity, Baghdad encircled by soldiers, civil war in Iraq, the war on Social Security in America—let's give everyone the circus of Saddam's trial.

Dahr Jamail nails it in "Things Are Getting Worse By the Day," posted yesterday on uruknet.info:

Keep in mind that all of this is against the backdrop of well over 50% unemployment, horrendous traffic jams, and an infrastructure in shambles that continues to degrade with next to no reconstruction occurring in Baghdad.

"Electricity shut offs drive us crazy in this hot summer," one of my friends wrote me recently, "Even we can't read at night because of long hours of electricity cuts and because the outside generators can't withstand running these long hours and we have to turn these generators off for some time to cool them!"

He continues, "Two years of occupation—for God sake, where is the rebuilding, where the hell are these billions donated to Iraq? Even not 1% improvement in services and electricity! They say again and again the terrorists are to blame and I would accept this, but why they do not protect these facilities? Do the American camps have cuts of electricity? No, no, and nobody will allow this to happen … but poor Iraqis, nobody would be sorry for them if they burn with the hell of summer, small kids and old men they get dehydrated because no electricity, no cold water, etc. Have you heard about the tea that is mixed with iron particles? It is real in our life. People have to make sure their tea is not mixed with iron by use of magnets."

Aw, quit your bitchin'. Iraq can be a great place in the summer—if you have connections. While Iraqis suffer in squatter camps or in their own paralyzed cities, U.S. soldiers and officials have seized Saddam's palaces and turned them into lush headquarters. And back in July 2003, grateful U.S. soldiers spent time at a mountain resort next to Lake Dukan in northern Iraq (see photo below).

The Kurdish proprietors, at the behest of U.S. pal Jalal Talabani, gave them the run of the place—swimming pool, showers, air conditioning:

"There isn't a better place in Iraq to spend my 4th of July," [one soldier] said. He added, with a sly grin, he wished he could spend more time at Lake Dukan, maybe even finish out his tour at the resort.

Now, Talabani is the president of the chaotic country. And it looks as if his strategy (and maybe the Pentagon's) is to distract everyone with the long-awaited show trial of Saddam. As Luke Baker of Reuters reported today:

Saddam Hussein could go on trial for crimes against humanity within two months, far earlier than expected, Iraq's new president, Jalal Talabani, said on Tuesday.

Asked in an interview televised on CNN when Saddam's trial would begin, Talabani said: "I hope within two months."

Leading Iraqi politicians have said several times that the trial could start within months. But Iraqi prosecutors and their U.S. advisers say a trial is more likely in 2006, after several of Saddam's lieutenants have been tried, to help build the case against the former dictator.

Iraqi leaders hope that trials of Saddam and his allies will help restore public confidence, sapped by relentless insurgent violence and political bickering that delayed the formation of a cabinet for months.

Maybe there's a dispute between the Bush regime and Kurdish leader Talabani, who's an unwilling puppet, unlike the country's former puppet ruler, the gangster Ayad Allawi. Maybe the Pentagon likes the idea of distracting the press and public with a Saddam trial. Or maybe everyone just wants to hurry up and start the trial before all the judges—like Barwiz Mahmoud Marwani—are assassinated.

What a day to commemorate dead soldiers: Iraq nears a meltdown into civil war, thanks to separate suicidal gestures by crazed insurgents and stupid U.S. officials.

As the Washington Post reported today:

Three suicide bombers strapped with explosives detonated themselves Monday morning amid a crowd of police commandos in the city of Hilla, southeast of Baghdad, killing 31 people and wounding 108, according to Dr. Muhammed Hadi of the Hilla hospital.

The attack targeted about 1,000 police commandos who were gathered for the second consecutive day to protest a decision by the governor of Babil province to disband their units.

Bloody hell. It was said to be the worst attack in Iraq in more than a year. The report by the Post's Saad Sarhan, Khalid Saffar, and Jonathan Finer continued:

The attacks came during a month of sustained violence by insurgents, who have killed more than 700 people across Iraq since the announcement of the country's new government at the end of April. The explosions in Hilla left the streets soaked in blood and strewn with body parts.

Now for our own suicidal gesture: U.S.-led troops stormed the house of Sunni moderate Mohsen Abdul-Hamid (left), put a bag over his head, cuffed him, and hauled him and his three sons away. Adrian Blomfield of the Telegraph (U.K.) reported:

He was freed 10 hours later, but the US military offered no explanation for his detention and stopped short of apologising.

"It was determined that he was detained by mistake and should be released," US central command said in a statement. "Coalition forces regret any inconvenience and acknowledge Mr Hamid's co-operation in resolving this matter."

What a heavy-handed blunder—I thought Jerry Bremer had already left Iraq.

Abdul-Hamid is the last Sunni you'd want to arrest. The head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, he's also a noted Koran scholar—do we get an apology now from the Pentagon for trashing, if not the Koran, at least a Koran scholar? I didn't think so.

This guy is perhaps the most influential Sunni politician who's willing to deal with the Bush regime and its puppet administration in Baghdad. Of course, Abdul-Hamid doesn't always agree, but he has been trying to pull his fellow Sunnis into the political process. Or at least he had been until the blustering raid. As the AP's Patrick Quinn reported:

The arrests came on the second day of Operation Lightning, a massive Iraqi-led anti-insurgent offensive in Baghdad that Abdul-Hamid's party opposes, believing security forces will trample on innocent people's rights.

Abdul-Hamid was taken from his home in the western Baghdad suburb of Khadra at about 6 a.m., along with his three sons and four guards, said party secretary-general Ayad al-Samarei.

"This is a provocative and foolish act and this is part of the pressure exerted on the party," al-Samarei said. "At the time when the Americans say they are keen on real Sunni participation, they are now arresting the head of the only Sunni party that calls for a peaceful solution and have participated in the political process."

Despite what Quinn says, this is a U.S.-led operation. Hell, the Iraqi "government" didn't even know this raid had taken place. And Abdul-Hamid and his party won't soon forget what the troops did. The indefatigable Dahr Jamail, known for The Face of War and other images and words from Iraq, blogged on the Italian site uruknet.info:

Abdul-Hamid refused [the U.S.] apology in the Arab media, and stated that he was humiliated when US soldiers held their boots on his head for 20 minutes.

It was also stated that he accused American soldiers of removing items from his home, including a computer. This is standard operating procedure with home raids—I can't tell you how many Iraqis I've interviewed after their homes were raided who complained of money, jewelry, and other belongings being looted by American soldiers.

The Islamic Party released a statement after the release of Abdul Hamid which said, "The U.S. administration claims it is interested in drawing Sunnis into the political process but it seems that their way of doing so is by raids, arrests, and violating human rights."

As far as Jamail is concerned, the civil war has already started:

At least 740 Iraqis have been killed since the new “government” took power in late April, and with the ongoing operations sparking more attacks each day, it doesn't look like there is an end in sight.

Keep in mind, the vast majority of the Iraqi security forces are either Shia or Kurdish battling against a primarily Sunni resistance (for now). It can easily be argued that we are witnessing a US-backed Iraqi government who is deliberating using its power to wage a civil war.

Of course, maybe the only thing that could stop a civil war is a united hatred of the bungling U.S. occupation. As the Telegraph's Blomfield wrote of the reaction to Abdul-Hamid's arrest:

Iraq's constantly bickering Sunni Arabs, Shias, and Kurds were united in condemnation of what was generally perceived as an outrage.

It appeared that the Americans had not sought permission for the raid from the Iraqi government, again raising questions about its supposed sovereignty.

Almost as scandalous as the searing evidence that the Cheney and Blair regimes decided in early 2002 to invade Iraq without justification and then cook up the justification later is the U.S. press's reaction.

Don't blame the government this time for the press's coverup.

Considering the global, electronic reach of the media, there's no excuse. And I have to say that I told you so.

Sparking my frustration is an e-mail that reader Richard Agler sent me on May 18, as news of the "Downing Street Memo"—and lamentations about why it was ignored over here—finally started circulating in the U.S. press.

More has been written in the U.S. about whether the memo should have been written about than about the contents and implications of the friggin' memo itself.

Anyway, Agler wrote me:

So where is your coverage of the Downing Street memo???

Thanks for writing, Richard, and bless your heart for reading, but don't blame me. I first wrote about it on April 30 in this Bush Beat item: "Bush, Blair Decided in '02 to Invade Iraq and Worry About Justification Later, Say Brit Papers":

A British government memo from '02 indicates that the Bush regime got Tony Blair to go along in July of that year with a plan to invade Iraq and then build the "intelligence and facts" to justify the decision, British newspapers are reporting tonight.

The bombshell memo, leaked to The Sunday Times (U.K.), was written a few weeks after Prime Minister Tony Blair traveled to George W. Bush's Crawford ranch for what the papers described as basically a "council of war" between the dumbass POTUS and the bright Brit who should have known better.

And why should Blair have known better? The Independent (U.K.) is also reporting tonight [April 30] that the Foreign Office told Blair even earlier, in March '02, that it had grave reservations about invading Iraq.

If what the papers are saying is true, we're not exactly shocked. But we're in awe of their gall.

That same night, I posted a follow-up piece, "Phony War, Real Deaths: More About the Blockbuster British Memos About Bush-Blair Pre-Invasion Plotting."

The next day, May 1, I wrote another piece, "Runaway Betrayal: How The Bush Regime Cooked Up Its Justifications For War. Read About It In The British Press."

Hey, I'm not taking credit for prying the memos out of 10 Downing. Michael Smith of the Times of London deserves all that credit. And other British reporters worked hard on the story, too. There's far more than just the "Downing Street Memo" in this tale of lying by Cheney and Blair and their minions.

In fact, my colleague Jarrett Murphy, who sits six feet from me in our Lower East Side rabbit warren, didn't ignore the Brits' work. He wrote about a related aspect of pre-war scheming and lying in an April 29 piece, "Blair and Dubya: War and Words," that's well worth reading.

Murphy's clever, but here's something else that's darkly funny: On the weekend that British news people were feverishly writing about these scandalous memos—a case of presidential abuse and lies far worse, and of course far more deadly, than Watergate—Laura Bush strapped it on and gave the Washington press corps a reacharound at the 91st annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner. I wrote about that absurdity at the time, in a May 1 piece, "That Bush is a Real Comedian." ABC News "reported" at the time: "Mrs. Bush Steals Show at Reporters' Dinner".

Good job, ABC and the rest of you. Now what about those stolen lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians? Take off your fucking tuxes, celebrity journalists, and get to work.

Updated 5/27/05 7:30 a.m.

Religious warfare got a major boost yesterday not only in parts of the globe where heathens live but also right here in America.

Activist judge Priscilla Owen (left), whose combination of corporate greed and holy zeal long ago won the hearts of Karl Rove and George W. Bush, finally won Senate confirmation for a lifetime seat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. She's the kind of religious zealot you'd find on courts in Iran—theocrats who try to use their beliefs to control others' behavior.

Case in point has been written about extensively: Owen's ridiculous opinion in a teen abortion case that came before the Texas Supreme Court. The case involved the Texas Parental Notification Act. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Alliance for Justice that sum it up:

• Prior to her original nomination, in each of the many cases that came before her involving Texas' Parental Notification Act, Justice Owen voted against allowing a minor to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents, often ignoring the law's explicit exceptions. In one case, she advocated requiring a minor to show an awareness of the "philosophic, moral, social and religious arguments that can be brought to bear" before obtaining judicial approval for an abortion without parental consent. The statute contains no such requirement.

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he was one of Justice Owen's colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, criticized Justice Owen in another case for attempting to re-write the parental notification statute, calling her dissent "an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

Yes, I know that Gonzales later explained it during his own confirmation hearing in January by insisting that he was actually criticizing himself for "judicial activism." Gonzales lied to the Senate. If you don't believe me, read his words from that opinion.

See the Alliance for Justice analysis of Owen's judicial work for more.

Owen is a Sunday School teacher at St. Barnabas the Encourager, a breakaway neo-orthodox Episcopalian congregation in Austin. You can read Pastor Jeff Black's Morning by Morning meditations if you want, but here's a passage from the Daily Texan last summer that should tell you what kind of behavior the church doesn't encourage:

Disagreements over tradition have led to a break within one Austin church. St. Barnabas the Encourager, a congregation founded in 1998, will leave the Episcopal Church because the church does not condone certain practices or believe in the Bible as the sole instrument of salvation.

And what "practices" are we talking about?

Phil Mallory, senior warden of St. Barnabas, said the break was provoked by the evolution of the Episcopal Church's doctrine. …

[The] beliefs of the St. Barnabas congregation leave no room for a gray area, Mallory said. "If they're practicing homosexuals, then the Bible is clear about that," Mallory said. "What it says is that God gave human beings a sexual relationship, but that is to be only in a marriage—a marriage defined between a man and a woman. And outside of marriage, you are to remain celibate."

Other instances of good ol' American tortured logic caught the eye of Amnesty International, whose annual report castigates the U.S. for setting the tone for Earth's last 12 months of inhumanity. AI's secretary-general, Irene Khan, notes:

The USA, as the unrivaled political, military, and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity. From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and "counter-terrorism."

Khan points out that AI published its first report on torture in 1973 and said at the time:

Torture rears its head when the legal barriers against it are barred. Torture feeds on discrimination and fear. Torture gains ground when official condemnation of it is less than absolute.

Then Khan adds:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

Yeah, well, the U.S. president was the hangingest governor in his country's history, so what do you expect?

What's worse is that we're likely to have even more opportunities to display our arrogance to the world about torture—and not just because John Bolton is just about to be confirmed as U.N. ambassador.

It's likely to be at least five more years until Iraqi forces can impose law and order and the U.S. can start pulling out troops, says the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London think tank that's closer to the views of Genghis Khan than it is to the views of Irene Kahn. The IISS also notes that Iraq is proving to be a fine breeding ground for terrorists—something that's been obvious to me and a lot of other people for a long time—so that means full employment for defense contractors. In other words, all is not lost.

As usual, it took the foreign press to put two and two together. In this case, Richard Norton-Taylor and Michael Howard, on the ground in Iraq for the Guardian (U.K.), wove the IISS report into the deadly chaos:

The report said that, on balance, US policy over the past year had been effective in emboldening regional players in the Middle East and the Gulf to rally against rogue states.

But it warned that the inspirational effect of the intervention in Iraq on Islamist terrorism was "the proverbial elephant in the living room. From al-Qaida's point of view, [President] Bush's Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged down America, hated by much of the Islamic world, and regarded warily even by its allies."

Iraq "could serve as a valuable proving ground for 'blooding' foreign jihadists, and could conceivably form the basis of a second generation of capable al-Qaida leaders … and middle-management players", the report said.

I'd predict that before Iraq calms down, we're going to be torturing Muslims in Central Asia—oops, we're already doing that. In fact, a cluster of 25 million repressed and boiling mad Muslims are yearning for revolution in Uzbekistan, one of the friendly dictatorships to which we're shipping prisoners for final answers. They could use some democracy, but what they have in mind is not a secular state. The U.S. has already picked its poison in that battle by continuing to prop up tyrant Islam Karimov. He's a ruthless, brutal, repressive sonofabitch who tortures his own people and he demands that they live in a secular state. That remind you of anyone else? Saddam Hussein, for instance? But for now, Karimov is our boy. Of course, that's going to ultimately be the losing side.

So let's see: Amid the bubbling revolts in Central Aphasia, just down the road in southwest Asia, the recruiting of hyper-conservative Muslim terrorists is up. Across the ocean in America, the recruiting of hyper-conservative Christian judges is up. All in all, prospects look great for an increase in religious warfare. The 21st century version of the Great Game looks more and more like the Crusades. It should last a while.

China's authoritarian government, facing millions of pissed-off Muslims within its own borders, has reached out to Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, vowing "unequivocal support," as the New York Times puts it this morning.

Wow, that's a real shocker. As the New Statesman notes:

In an era when TV determines an event's importance, the massacre in the Uzbek town of Andijan has received less coverage than it deserves. Camera access denied, few stories supplied.

The reported death toll of more than 700 constitutes one of the worst cases of bloodshed involving government troops and civilian protesters since Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The upheaval in, first, Kyrgyzstan and now Uzbekistan has complicated the Great Game for George W. Bush's handlers.

Kyrgyz despot Askar Akayev was merely a supporting player in the imperial drama over Central Asia—though not to his people, who booted his ass out in March. But Karimov and Uzbekistan are a different matter.

As much as Karimov is a rich caricature of an unenlightened despot, Uzbekistan is simply rich. Aesthetically, the place is miraculous—Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, palaces, domes, mosques, 3,000-year-old burgs, staggering mountains, terrible deserts, fertile valleys, grand canyons.

That wouldn't make it valuable except as a vacation spot for Wall Streeters. What the U.S., Russia, and China are fighting over is a country incredibly rich in money-making resources, which I guess also makes it a vacation spot for Wall Streeters. As Alisa Newman pointed out in '99 in "Investing in Uzbekistan: a rough ride on the Silk Road," a shrewd piece in Law and Policy in International Business:

Although Uzbekistan lacks the vast Caspian Sea oil reserves of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan … , its lands swell with other valuable resources. These are known as Uzbekistan's three "golds": white (cotton), of which it is the world's fourth largest producer; blue (natural gas), of which it is the world's 10th largest producer; and gold, of which it is the world's eighth largest producer.

Like flies to shit, various capitalists, like Enron's Ken Lay (with Bush's personal help), have been drawn to Uzbekistan.

So have far less harmful and much more creative people, like M.J. Engh and John Candy.

Engh's well-regarded 1987 novel Arslan is truly a shocker—a Central Asian dictator swiftly conquers the modern-day U.S. and sets up his HQ in a small town in Illinois, where he rapes youngsters and becomes friends with a school principal and … well, just read it. Author Mary Jane Engh, also a scholar of Roman history, places the title character as hailing from Turkiston, which is what the modern Uzbekistan once was.

The late John Candy and the rest of the old SCTV crew savaged "Uzbek treachery" in a send-up of Soviet-era Russian TV.

More recently, a real-life sex drama linked Islam Karimov's daughter to a bitter divorce battle in New Jersey. Peter Baker of the Washington Post wove a terrific tale last year:

It turns out that divorcing Gulnora Karimova, known as "the Uzbek princess," is no simple matter. Her father is Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan and autocrat nonpareil, who rules over a repressive Central Asian country where prisoners have been boiled alive. He also happens to be a key ally in America's war on terrorism.

Karimova took the kids in 2001 and has been ducking an arrest warrant issued by a New Jersey judge ever since, hiding out in Moscow, where she knows officials won't cross her father.

Whatever Gulnora wants, Gulnora gets—or "Lola," as the New Statesman's Julian Holloway recalls the delectable daughter of the despot in "Dancing As the People Die." Here's how Holloway starts his piece:

I once danced with President Karimov's daughter Lola at her nightclub, the Katakomba. After a few seconds her bodyguard cut in, and off she went past Uzbekistan's elite, her head set like a princess's under the flashing lights.

Since then things have changed in Tashkent.

The real change, an overthrow of Lola's dad, hasn't happened yet. But it will.

Judgment day must be near: Discourse is rough everywhere in America except where it should be—in Congress.

Striking a blow against democracy, the entrenched members of the nation's most exclusive club preserved their civil atmosphere Monday but poisoned the civic atmosphere for the rest of us.

As the Washington Post notes this morning:

Fourteen Republican and Democratic senators broke with their party leaders last night to avert a showdown vote over judicial nominees, agreeing to votes on some of President Bush's nominees while preserving the right to filibuster others in "extraordinary circumstances."

The dramatic announcement caught Senate leaders by surprise and came on the eve of a scheduled vote to ban filibusters of judicial nominees, the "nuclear option" that has dominated Senate discussions for weeks. The deal clears the way for prompt confirmation of three appellate court nominees—Priscilla R. Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, and William H. Pryor Jr.

If you don't know who Janice Rogers Brown is, you haven't been reading The Black Commentator, which recently wrote:

Brown is a disciple of the Federalist Society, far-right lawyers who hate almost everything that has occurred since ratification of the Constitution, with the exception of the establishment of corporations as virtual legal persons.

In an October 2003 profile of Brown, The Black Commentator, borrowing from the Guardian (U.K.), noted:

The California state judge “has such an atrocious civil rights record she makes Clarence Thomas look like Thurgood Marshall," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA) at a Congressional Black Caucus press conference, last week. "She's cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas," declared Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting representative in the House, and one of the caucus’s leading legal lights.

The buzz words of this monumental cave-in by the Senate just kill me. "Armageddon has been avoided," the BBC quoted New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer as saying.

Schumer was referring to the Bush regime's vow to shut down the Senate if a compromise wasn't reached about the fight over a few of Bush's reactionary judges.

It was the GOP that cooked up the phrase "nuclear option" to warn what would happen if the Democrats filibustered. The Democrats, eager to preserve the decorum of the clubby Senate, bought into that language. Armageddon, it's not. Armageddon tired of these so-called Democrats running scared.

Once again, the extremists among the Republicans have set not only the agenda but the words used during this war over filibusters. As the BBC says this morning:

Republicans have been accusing Democrats of behaving in an unconstitutional manner by advocating the tactic, and threatened to abolish the rule for judicial nominations.

Democrats—and some critics on the Republican side—have pointed out that the same tactic was used against former President Bill Clinton's nominees.

They also point out that there is little difference between the ratio of approvals to blocked nominations under President Bush and that of the Clinton administration.

If the Republican side had gone ahead, in a plan which would have used the vote of Vice-President Dick Cheney to declare the filibuster unconstitutional, the upshot could have been to freeze Senate business altogether.

Republicans originally called this the "nuclear option", before switching to the term "constitutional option."

More and more, Congress is drifting away from the people who supposedly elect it. The U.S. House is assuredly no longer small-D democratic, as I noted last September. The Center for Voting and Democracy says:

More than 90 percent of Americans live in congressional districts that are essentially one-party monopolies.

Meanwhile, the Senate, set up to be more exclusive with its six-year terms, is increasingly clubby. Another of its 14 "moderates," John McCain, said, "The Senate won and the country won."

No, actually it was C. Boyden Gray, Bush-Cheney Inc.'s fix-it guy during the Florida Fiasco of '00 and a major player behind the scenes in Ohio in the '04 election, who won. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of the Washington Post dug behind the scenes of this current mess to produce a shrewd piece this morning that sussed out Gray's role:

The eccentric Gray stood at the center of what had threatened to become a historic confrontation between the political parties. The former White House counsel was as responsible as anyone for the attempt to change Senate rules to smooth the way for approval of the president's judicial nominees. Yesterday evening, his efforts were upended by an eleventh-hour compromise that apparently has averted the showdown. But Gray won a partial victory because filibustering of federal judgeship nominations will now be much more rare.

One reason that Gray, White House counsel for George W. Bush's pappy, is considered "eccentric" is that he's loathed by the neocons when it comes to foreign policy but he's cherished by the Bush regime as a supreme troubleshooter on domestic issues.

Gray's been on the inside of some heavy political maneuvering for decades. In an interesting piece last week about Gray's pitch to be named Bush's ambassador to the European Union, Marc Perelman wrote in The Forward:

C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel in the administration of George H.W. Bush, is a top contender to be named to the increasingly important diplomatic position in Brussels. This is said to have angered some powerful neocon figures. …

Gray's deeper problem appears to be his alignment with Republicans from the so-called "realist" school of foreign policy. The realist school, often associated with Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the senior Bush, opposes the neoconservatives' vision of projecting American force in order to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Gray is identified with the younger Bush on domestic policy, and is known as a leading advocate of the administration's effort to appoint conservative judges to the federal bench. At the same time, Gray is a member of a small group of Republicans, known as the Committee for the Republic, who oppose parts of the president's foreign policy. After America's invasion of Iraq, the committee issued a manifesto to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values."

Yeah, fine, send the guy overseas, for God's sakes. Anything to keep him from meddling any more with the Senate.

Now that Pat Tillman's family has spoken out about the government's "disgusting" coverup of his futile death, the former NFL star (left) can finally rest in peace. It's clear that his third and final career—as a propaganda tool for the Bush regime—is mercifully over. As Josh White writes in today's Washington Post:

More than a year after their son was shot several times by his fellow Army Rangers on a craggy hillside near the Pakistani border, Tillman's mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country. They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious, and that they are certain they will never get the full story.

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he did what he did," Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son's death. "The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

The Post's former managing editor Steve Coll dug up the coverup last year in a memorable series of stories. Coll wrote in December:

Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers—some in their first firefight—who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.

The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.

Meanwhile, the boss of Tillman's commanders—Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld—wasted no opportunity to use Tillman's death to make the Bush regime's dirty war schemes sparkle. On September 10, 2004, before Coll broke the full story of the Tillman scandal, Rumsfeld took the podium at the National Press Club in D.C. to say:

A few short years after Osama bin Laden ridiculed the American soldier as a paper tiger, saying that after a few blows, they run in defeat, the names of Todd Beamer and Pat Tillman, and so many other brave Americans, live as symbols of our country's courage and determination.

Yes, Tillman is a symbol of the bungled search for bin Laden, which was slowed to a crawl so the Bush regime could divert troops to Iraq, liberate Halliburton, and set the stage for a generation of war—the kind of profitable undertaking that the officials of Oceania would be proud of.

Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov has put the lid on a rebellion, but it's just a matter of time before he gets burned so badly that he has to run for his life from a country that ranks in the world's top 10 in both natural wealth and torture.

While we're waiting for the 25 million angry and poor Uzbeks to come to a boil again, here's evidence that George W. Bush doesn't neglect human rights—at least when the human is one of his low friends in high places.

It's also proof that Bush has been nothing more than a puppet, a front man, for his entire public life.

In this case, the Señor Wences who pulled his strings was Enron's Ken Lay, Bush's single biggest campaign contributor.

In February 2002, The Smoking Gun posted 40 pages of Bush-Lay love letters, and Slate's Timothy Noah and the Washington Post's Hanna Rosin, among others, had some fun with them.

My current favorite is Lay's April 3, 1997, letter to Bush (then the Texas governor), instructing Dubya to lobby Uzbekistan's U.S. ambassador, Sadyq Safaev (left). Posted by The Smoking Gun, it's addressed "Dear Governor Bush," but Ken crossed that out and wrote "George." It continued:

You will be meeting with Ambassador Sadyq Safaev, Uzbekistan's Ambassador to the United States, on April 8th. Ambassador Safaev has been Foreign Minister and the senior advisor to President Karimov before assuming his nation's most significant foreign responsibility.

There was no pretense. Lay didn't write, "I understand you have a meeting with … " or "Do you have time in your schedule to … ." No, Lay instructed Bush: "You will be meeting … " Lay's four-paragraph letter was a script; its second paragraph contained the talking points:

Enron has established an office in Tashkent and we are negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan and Gazprom of Russia to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. This project can bring significant economic opportunities to Texas, as well as Uzbekistan. The political benefits to the United States and to Uzbekistan are important to that entire region.

The third paragraph alerted Bush to the fact that the Uzbek envoy was not only a dignitary but also a politician:

Ambassador Safaev is one of the most effective of the Washington Corps of Ambassadors, a man who has the attention of his president, and a person who works daily to bring our countries together.

Lay, who always had the attention of his future president, wrapped up the letter with boilerplate stuff:

For all these reasons, I am delighted that the two of you are meeting. I know you and Ambassador Safaev will have a productive meeting which will result in a friendship between Texas and Uzbekistan.

Anything you say, Ken. By the way, Enron got its deal with the Karimov regime. Enron eventually pulled back, and Exxon stepped in.

Not that those were the first U.S. companies to make deals with Karimov. In 1993, Dresser Industries—on whose board Dubya's grandpa, Prescott Bush, sat for 22 years, and which gave Dubya's pappy his first job after World War II—agreed to design and build a $200 million gas plant for the dictator's state-owned Neftegas—the deal was helped along by $50 million from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, one of our many government agencies protecting, nourishing, and subsidizing corporate humans' rights.

A few years later, in '98, the CEO of Halliburton decided to acquire Dresser Industries. That CEO was Dick Cheney.

Now that Uzbekistan is finally boiling over, it's heartening to know that millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used by dictator Islam Karimov to kill his rebelling citizens.

You didn't know that? It's old news. In 2002, British ambassador to Tashkent Craig Murray publicized Karimov's appalling torture—and the fact that the U.S. and Great Britain used Uzbekistan to torture terrorism suspects—and the British Foreign Office fired him and tried to silence him. But the press picked up on Murray's courageous rendition of Karimov's sordid abuses. Back in May 2003, Nick Paton Walsh of the Guardian (U.K.) pointed out the hell that Uzbeks endure:

Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.

The U.S. condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America's strategic interests in Central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington's new best friend in the region.

The U.S. is funding those it once condemned. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500 million in aid. The police and intelligence services—which the State Department's website says use "torture as a routine investigation technique"—received $79 million of this sum.

Mr. Karimov was President Bush's guest in Washington in March [2002]. They signed a "declaration" which gave Uzbekistan security guarantees and promised to strengthen "the material and technical base of [their] law enforcement agencies."

You didn't know about Karimov's visit? EurasiaNet's Kenan Aliyev explained at the time:

Uzbek President Islam Karimov is maintaining a low profile during his visit to the United States, apparently out of a desire to keep controversy over Uzbekistan’s human-rights record to a minimum.

Karimov was scheduled to meet with U..S Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld early March 13, then travel to New York for several appointments, including a discussion with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

On March 12, Karimov had a 45-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush. After the meeting, Karimov left the White House without pausing to speak with gathered journalists. In general, Uzbek Embassy representatives have been reluctant to divulge information about the visit, and media access to members of the visiting Uzbek delegation has been extremely limited. U.S. officials have likewise provided only general information concerning the Karimov visit, declining to reveal specifics about discussions.

You can be sure that the next regime in charge of Uzbekistan will remember not only that Karimov's government has boiled prisoners to death but also how the Bush regime has propped him up. Bill Clinton's crew would occasionally condemn human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan, but our military help to Karimov began during Clinton's regime, as Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post reported back in August 2002 in a prescient piece titled "U.S. Plants Footprint in Shaky Central Asia":

During the 1990s the United States began to quietly build influence in the area. Washington established significant military-to-military relationships with Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Soldiers from those countries have been trained by Americans. Uzbekistan alone will receive $43 million in U.S. military aid this year. The militaries of all three have an ongoing relationship with the National Guard of a U.S. state—Kazakhstan with Arizona, Kyrgyzstan with Montana, Uzbekistan with Louisiana. The countries also participated in NATO's Partnership for Peace program.

"We wanted to extend our influence in the region, and promote American values, too," said Jeffrey Starr, a Pentagon official who was responsible for these relationships during the second Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Under Bush's handlers, any half-hearted attempts to pressure Karimov were forgotten after 9/11, and we stepped up our training of Karimov's military.

The Uzbek people will remember that—in their nightmares. As the U.N. news service IRIN reports from a refugee camp (see photo) across the border in Kyrgyzstan:

The refugees told IRIN they wanted to stay in Kyrgyzstan in order to escape persecution in Uzbekistan.

"What we witnessed in Andijan was slaughter—a regime capable of that is capable of anything," said a woman who had left her two children behind in the city when she fled for her life early on Saturday morning.

The next government of Uzbekistan will be Islamic—you can bet on it. As Bagila Bukharbayeva of the Associated Press writes this morning from Korasuv:

The leader of a group of rebels claiming to control this Uzbek border town said Wednesday that he and his supporters intend to build an Islamic state and would fight back if government troops attempt to crush their revolt.

"We will be building an Islamic state here in accordance with the Koran," Bakhtiyor Rakhimov told The Associated Press while leaning down from the back of a horse.

That's just one town and one horseman. But this is no game. Robin Williams (see photo) won't be back here any time soon. This is just another chapter in the Great Game, and we're on the wrong side, in a more obvious way than we were in the recent (and successful) populist revolt against Kyrgyz dictator Askar Akayev. Akayev didn't get our strong support because he balked at cooperating with the Bush regime's War of Terror. Karimov, on the other hand, has been one of our stalwarts, a part of the "coalition of the willing."

That must be troubling to the thousands of U.S. soldiers stationed in Uzbekistan, especially at Karshi-Khanabad, where the New York-flavored troops have given the "streets," where they pitch their tents and build permanent structures, such names as Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Long Island Expressway. (That's old news, too, reported by the Washington Post's Kaiser.)

Here in America, New Yorkers complain about the traffic jams on the L.I.E. as they go to the Hamptons for polo matches. But in Uzbekistan, the New York-based soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, who proudly travel on their own L.I.E., are faced with horsemen of a different color.

How much longer will we be keeping our permanent-looking base at Karshi-Khanabad? Will it survive if Uzbekistan, currently ruled by a hardline secular regime, is taken over by a hardline Islamic regime?

Our soldiers sit in the midst of 25 million angry Muslims long repressed by a dictator we're arming and have kept in power. A question for Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney: Will you dispatch troops from the base to help Karimov "maintain order"?

The dictator is keeping his usual tight grip on information, so we don't know what's happening with this inevitable, bloody revolt against his rule. As IRIN puts it:

A Western diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, told IRIN that a government-organized trip to Andijan—the scene of mass killings by Uzbek forces on Friday—had been "completely stage managed by Tashkent" in order to prevent foreigners and journalists from gaining information to support claims that more than 500 people were gunned down in and around the city's central square. "We were not allowed to talk to local people, see hospitals or morgues, or move freely around the city," the diplomat said.

Sooner or later, though, Karimov will fall, and we may still be clutching at his coattails as he plummets.

Telling the U.S. Senate what millions of Americans are yearning to say about the unjustified Iraq war, British MP George Galloway came to D.C. after being named in the oil-for-food scandal and delivered a historic ass-whipping.

The BBC called it "one of the most flamboyant Senate testimonies ever."

Galloway brought up numerous topics, including the oil-for-slush scandal, which Congress has chosen to ignore.

The U.S. press—don't blame me—has practically ignored the colorful Scot who's Great Britain's most prominent war critic and who just regained a seat in Parliament.

Determinedly establishment as always, the New York Times, twitched its nose at the pungent dialogue and let a Reuters story do the work. The Washington Post's Colum Lynch described the scene this way in a story buried inside this morning's edition:

A British lawmaker forcefully denied allegations in a Senate hearing yesterday that he received rights to purchase millions of barrels of Iraqi oil at a discount from Saddam Hussein's government, and he delivered a fiery attack on three decades of U.S. policy toward Iraq.

George Galloway, a formidable debater recently ousted from the British Labor Party after attacking Prime Minister Tony Blair for supporting the war in Iraq, used his appearance before the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations as a forum to challenge the veracity of the Bush administration's case for going to war.

He also unleashed a personal attack against panel Chairman Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), calling his investigation the "mother of all smoke screens" designed to "divert attention from the crimes that you supported" by endorsing President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

The BBC's Matthew Davis, familiar with the blunt style of politics practiced in every democracy but our own, put it this way:

Far from displaying the forelock-tugging deference to which senators are accustomed, Mr. Galloway went on the attack

He rubbished committee chairman Norm Coleman's dossier of evidence and stared him in the eye.

"Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," the MP declared.

The whole room scanned Mr. Coleman's face for a reaction. The senator shifted in his seat—nervously it seemed.

It was the first time a British politician had been interrogated as a hostile witness at the U.S. Senate—but Mr. Galloway cast himself not as the accused, but the accuser.

On stage at the heart of American power, he attacked the U.S.-led war on Iraq and accused Washington of installing a "puppet" regime there.

Thanks to the dogged people at Information Clearing House, you can listen for yourself—plus read the transcript of his remarks.

Galloway didn't look at notes. He stared directly at Coleman and, as the Info Clearing House's tape will show you, eloquently told the Bush gang just how far it had gone agley:

Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions-busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions-busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."