The unluckiest people in the path of history's deadliest tsunami were those on Sumatra, in Indonesia's Aceh province—and the luckiest were the executives of ExxonMobil.

The stupidest single person in the wake of the wake was George W. Bush, who missed a once-in-a-planet's-lifetime chance to win over the hearts of a billion Muslims. Why didn't he jump into action right away? All he had to do was say some words. But he kept on picking up sticks at his ranch, instead of doing his real job. There's never been a more lazy-ass president.

The storm didn't force the world's largest oil company to lift a finger, either. Australia's ABC News reported this morning that the death toll in Aceh alone could top 80,000. But the tsunami left untouched the very northern tip of Aceh, site of ExxonMobil's Arun natural-gas field. The industry news service Schlumberger put things in the right perspective in its Monday story "ExxonMobil: Indonesia Quake Caused 'Minor' Ops Disruption":

Despite the horrific toll in human suffering, analysts and government officials are breathing a sigh of relief that Indonesia has been spared the economic impact of serious earthquake-related damage to the liquid natural gas facilities in the quake-stricken province.

Indonesia, the only Asian member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the world's largest LNG exporter and relies heavily on petroleum revenues to support its sputtering economy, which has seen growth falling behind that of its regional neighbors in recent years.

The oil bidness in Aceh is where the murder, rape, and torture come in. In way, the people of Aceh who did survive are lucky: The killings have stopped, many of the killers probably swept away as if Travis Bickle's daydream had come true.

Even before the tsunami, Aceh was hell on earth. This is how the International Labor Rights Fund explains it:

In the past decade alone, ExxonMobil has extracted some $40 billion from its operations in Aceh, Indonesia, leaving in its wake a legacy of death, destruction, and environmental damage.

There have been credible reports dating back several years that Exxon Mobil Corporation, along with its predecessor companies, Mobil Oil Corporation and Mobil Oil Indonesia, hired military units of the Indonesian national army to provide "security" for their gas extraction and liquification project in Aceh, Indonesia. Members of these military units regularly have perpetrated ongoing and severe human rights abuses against local villagers, including murder, rape, torture, destruction of property, and other acts of terror. ExxonMobil apparently has taken no action to stop this violence, and instead, reportedly has continued to finance the military and to provide company equipment and facilities that have been used by the Indonesian military to perpetrate and literally cover up (in the form of mass graves) these criminal acts.

The ILRF has sued ExxonMobil over the tortures and murders, but the company vigorously denies involvement. What's darkly hilarious about this is that the U.S. State Department has encouraged D.C. federal judge Louis Oberdorfer to throw out the case, warning in 2002 that the lawsuit "would impact adversely on the interests of the United States," meaning our financial interests, as well as compromise our "war on terrorism." See, the lawsuit gets in the way with our close relationship with Indonesia's military—whose butts our own Paul Wolfowitz has long kissed. And of course, the suit is directed at ExxonMobil, a huge contributor to Bush.

The problem is this: As many people have pointed out, the State Department itself has catalogued and condemned the murders, tortures, and rapes in Aceh. The State Department's lengthy 2003 human-rights report on Indonesia focuses mainly on Aceh. Here are some excerpts:

• Human rights abuses were most apparent in Aceh province, the scene of a long-running separatist revolt.

• Physical torture cases included random beatings and acts involving the hair, nails, teeth, and genitals. Heat, suffocation, electricity, and suspension were also used. Psychological torture cases reportedly included food and sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, being forced to witness torture, and being forced to participate in torture.

• The [Government's] security forces committed numerous extrajudicial killings that were not politically motivated. The government largely failed to hold soldiers and police accountable for such killings and other serious human rights abuses, particularly in Aceh.

• The Government made no progress in establishing accountability in a number of extrajudicial killings in Aceh in 2002, including the June killings of two farmers on Kayee Ciret Mountain and the August killings of three women in the north Aceh village of Kandang. . . . The Government reported no progress in prosecuting those responsible for acts of torture committed in Aceh in 2002, including the beating and burning of civilian Rizki Muhammad.

• During the year, hundreds of disappearances occurred, most frequently in Aceh province, and large numbers of persons who disappeared over the past 20 years, mainly in conflict areas, remained unaccounted for at year's end.

• According to [human-rights group] Kontras, at least 17 verified cases of torture or beatings involving women or children were recorded in Aceh during the [Government's] military operation, which began on May 19 and continued through year's end. According to a November press report, a TNI [Indonesian Army] military commander in Aceh, Brigadier General Bambang Darmono, declared that beating suspected rebels was acceptable: "For example, my soldier slugs a suspect across the face. That's no problem, as long as he is able to function after the questioning. [But] if it's gross torture, which causes someone to be incapacitated . . . that's a no-no."

It goes on like this for page after bloody page—from our own State Department, no less.

Of course, the New York-based Human Rights Watch has been trying to wake up the world to Aceh's nightmare, doing real digging by interviewing victims and so on. HRW notes in its September 2004 report:

These are systemic failures, not just the acts of rogue soldiers and police or untrained, poorly resourced judges and prosecutors. The stories of torture are chilling and sadly similar to accounts of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces in Aceh in the past and in other parts of the country.

But here's what it gets really sticky for the U.S., thanks to the Bush regime. When the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up last April, so did officials of the countries we've long scolded for human-rights abuses. Indonesia condemned the Abu Ghraib abuses—and brutally. HRW tells it like this:

Major Farid Ma'ruf, a spokesman for Kopassus, the Indonesian military’s notorious special forces unit, said, "It is ironic that torture and sexual abuse were committed by the military of a country that always claims to be the world's human rights guardian. The treatment of Iraqi prisoners was clearly inhumane because the military should have strict standards on how to properly interrogate detainees."

He should know. HRW interviewed numerous people who say they were tortured at the hands of Kopassus forces. But after Abu Ghraib, our moral authority is shot. (As if we had the right to claim it in the first place.) Last May, when the State Department released its human-rights report, Indonesian officials went ballistic. HRW tells it this way:

In response to the . . . report on human rights, which highlighted a variety of abuses in Indonesia, Marty Natalegawa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, shot back: "The U.S. government does not have the moral authority to assess or act as a judge of other countries, including Indonesia, on human rights, especially after the abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison."

Yes, that's what the Bush regime has wrought. So yesterday, when Dubya finally put on a fittingly somber suit to pose as a businesslike world figure, what did he do to repair our image? He treated the English language the way Chuck Graner treated prisoners.

Bush often transforms from prop to malaprop, but he really slashed syntaxes yesterday when, defensive as usual, he inarticulated the U.S.'s position on disaster aid:

"No, we're a very generous, kindhearted nation.

You know, the—what you're beginning to see is a typical response from America. First of all, we provide immediate cash relief, to the tune of about $35 billion."

Well, it was a typical response from Bush, anyway. We spend $35 billion every five months on the Iraq Debacle. Put another way, $35 billion equals two years of Wall Street bonuses.

He meant to say $35 million. Put another way, $35 million equals what two Wall Street execs got in bonuses last year.

Whoever types up the official White House transcripts probably has a macro for "[sic]"

The smirking Bush crowed about the U.S.'s generosity, blasting his critics as "very misguided and ill-informed." He's misinformed, as my colleague Jarrett Murphy pointed out Monday: Per capita, the U.S. is not the most generous.

At least the tsunami halted the murder, rape, and torture in Aceh. Latest reports say at least 500 Indonesian military officers on Aceh are reported missing. Guess it's their turn.

Even a disaster of Biblical proportions failed to rouse the bored-again George W. Bush from his Christmas vacation in Crawford, Texas.

The monumental Indian Ocean tsunami was the closest thing to the Genesis flood that we'll probably ever see. Any other U.S. president, including Daddy Bush, would have immediately gone public with comforting words and a bucketful of money. This earth-shaking event, the most deadly tsunami in the planet's recorded history, has left hundreds of millions of Asians—those who weren't swept away—with mountains of debris to clean up and victims to mourn.

Our president spent yesterday clearing brush at his ranch, while making sure the U.S. was pitching in to help the unprecedented disaster's victims.

So yesterday, we pledged $15 million. My colleague Jarrett Murphy immediately put that rather small largesse into perspective. Here's some more context: Lloyd S. Blankfein, president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, received a nearly $20 million bonus in 2003, the New York Times breathlessly reported in a totally unrelated story that I made fun of because it was totally unrelated to the real world.

But now I finally understand how our compassionate conservatism is only conservatively compassionate. The Bush regime's Scrooge-like behavior prompted an outcry, and the U.S. chipped in $20 million more. And the Washington Post reported this morning that, even though there were "complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions," the president wasn't ignoring the issue of debris:

Earlier yesterday [December 28], White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president was confident he could monitor events effectively without returning to Washington or making public statements in Crawford, where he spent part of the day clearing brush and bicycling.

Now that's what I call homeland security—protecting your own territory from menacing tree limbs and branches. But the good news he brought to Asians was that the U.S. more than doubled its initial contribution of $15 million.

Here's another frame of reference: In 2003, E. Stanley O'Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, (and a record-setting fundraiser for Bush's campaign), got a bonus of $13.5 million plus stock worth $11.2 million, as the Times calculated it.

If you're keeping track, this is the running total:

• U.S. aid after tsunami: $35 million

• Bonuses paid in 2003 to corporate execs Blankfein and O'Neal: $44.7 million

Maybe Bush just blanks out when he's down in Crawford. Rick Perlstein captured the president's "divine calm" in a Voice story last May that began this memorable way:

For George W. Bush, August 6, 2001, had to have been a pretty harrowing day, reading as he did in his Daily Brief that operatives of Osama bin Laden were "in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," and surveilling federal buildings in New York, and mulling over plans to attack Washington, D.C. But a reporter who saw him cavorting on his Crawford ranch not long after said, "The president was probably at the most relaxed I've ever seen him."

Adding insult to injury, Bush later refused to make public that warning he had received more than a month before 9/11 and hadn't taken seriously.

When Bush is in Crawford, nothing seems serious.

Gregory Gallina writes:

Gonzales grilled Kerik a pork chop and some veggies.

Thank you for reading. And your line is food for thought, Gregory.

But now we're faced with the prospect of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. The Senate will really be out to lunch if Gonzales doesn't get a grilling next month—unless common sense prevails and the Bush regime withdraws his name.

I'm sure George W. Bush's handlers aren't considering that, but they had better hope that somebody better than Gonzales at vetting is vetting Gonzales. They need him to be attorney general so he can squelch a number of investigations.

Unless the Senate forces Gonzales to throw in the trowel, these are just a few of the questions around which he will be erecting a stone wall:

• Did high-level Pentagon officials know that underling Larry Franklin supposedly fed information on Iran under the table to Israel through AIPAC? Was one of those officials the alleged spy's boss, fanatical pro-Israel hawk Doug Feith? And was there anyone else involved? To refresh your memory, here are a couple of paragraphs from a September 4 Washington Post story by Robin Wright and Dan Eggen:

[FBI] investigators have asked questions about personnel in the office of Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith as well as members of the influential Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to former U.S. officials who have been questioned and others familiar with the case.

Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues, including Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode, and others at the Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle of the defense board and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney's office, according to sources familiar with or involved in the case.

• Did oil consultant James Giffen bribe his pal Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in the late '90s on behalf of U.S. oil companies and with the full knowledge of the CIA and other top government officials? Giffen's lawyers contend that whatever he did in the Kazakhgate scandal, he was acting as an "agent" of the U.S. government. Giffen's trial is scheduled to start next month in federal court in Manhattan. Will Dick Cheney be deposed? Will he be called to testify? Cheney was on Nazarbayev's exclusive oil advisory board at the time this scheming took place. I'd like to meet the federal prosecutor who has the ovaries or balls to call Cheney to the stand, or even depose him.

Gonzales is needed to cap this potentially blazing oil conflagration, although now that Bush has won a second term, and oil companies are coughing up huge dough for the inauguration and other necessities, maybe the feds will cut a deal with Giffen anyway, thus keeping the tales of scandalously crooked behavior out of press.

• Who at the White House leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak? Who better to have as attorney general, the person in charge of federal prosecutors and the FBI, than the White House's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales?

• What did Bush himself know about the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib? When did he know it? There would be nobody better to squelch those questions than Gonzales, who advised Bush that such blatant disregard for international law (and non-Christian human beings) was okey-dokey. Will the White House ever be held accountable for its tortured torture logic? Not if Gonzales becomes AG, that's for sure.

Judge Al, as he is known in some circles, has done more damage to human rights during the Bush regime than even John Ashcroft did. My colleague Nat Hentoff has pointed out many of Gonzales's most egregious actions—like the idea that the "war on terror," according to a January 2002 memo Gonzales wrote to Bush, "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales has been slapped down by the Supreme Court—hell, even the JAG lawyers think he's too harsh on prisoners.

At Gonzales's best, he simply shares the "compassion" of his boss. Before becoming president, Bush was the hangingest governor in American history. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Salon in August 1999 that Bush "presided over an execution in Texas almost every two weeks since his election [as governor]."

Bush's typically careless and inattentive behavior, in this instance toward pleas of clemency, was enabled back in his goobernatorial years by his factotum Gonzales. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Alan Berlow pointed out in "The Hanging Governor," also in Salon:

Even Bush's former counsel, Judge Alberto R. Gonzales, says that a typical execution would receive no more than 30 minutes of the governor's time.

Bush did little but bumble along as president until 9/11 gave the neocons, war profiteers, and others in the gang around Bush the excuse they needed. As Derrick Z. Jackson wrote earlier this month in the Boston Globe:

Gonzales and Bush used the war on terror to justify the United States being a law unto itself. Lynndie England may get nearly four decades in jail. Alberto Gonzales is about to get four years to rewrite our laws. If England is the face of abuse, Gonzales is the hidden hand. If he becomes attorney general, you should not be shocked if new abuses of civil liberties occur in your school, your library, perhaps even in your home.

A good blistering by the Senate, followed by withdrawal or rejection, wouldn't be cruel and unusual punishment for Gonzales. He has given the OK for Americans caught in bad situations to engage in the basest human behavior. Because he flouts the Constitution, international law, and commonly recognized human rights, he puts people like the Abu Ghraib prison guards in position to fail as human beings.

Gonzales just brings out the worst in others.

Great news today from the real battleground of the War on Terror: Wall Street's big bonuses are back.

This morning's New York Times reports this year's gains, after noting that "the totals in 2003 were already impressive." The breathless story by Jenny Anderson is devoid of any mention of the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.

And of course there's no mention of the fact that many American families are having to buy armor for their children fighting in Iraq because George W. Bush's regime refuses to do it.

But even though our huge "defense" industry generates millions of dollars for investment bankers, and Mr. and Mrs. Average Struggling American's mortgage is churned by other bankers into billions of dollars in derivative-securities markets, and funds for education—even of soldiers' children—are being slashed, why bring that stuff up? This story is about long lines at Ferrari dealerships and purchases of $10 million apartments. Anderson notes:

The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall Street firms—Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns—have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have given out handsome bonuses.

Anderson writes that "an investment banking analyst right out of college would have made a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a $115,000 bonus."

And that was last year. She adds:

This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers. Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual. They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance, as well as the individual's contribution.

This year's bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star bankers and traders in the heyday of the late '90s technology bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street's elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.

Oh, this is such great news that I can't resist one more cheery paragraph from Anderson:

Wall Street bonuses are expected to total $15.9 billion in 2004—second only to $19.5 billion in 2000—according to Alan G. Hevesi, the state comptroller of New York. In 2003, bonuses totaled $15.8 billion. Mr. Hevesi said bonuses of that magnitude were "good news for New York."

OK, that's enough good news. Now let's go back to November 2003, when journalist Dave Lindorff catalogued the Bush regime's treatment of the people it has sent to die in Iraq for that very profitable war. Lindorff sets the stage by saying:

Even more than his father, and Ronald Reagan before him, Bush is cutting budgets for myriad programs intended to protect or improve the lives of veterans and active-duty soldiers. Bush’s handlers have worked hard, through the use of snappy salutes and fly-boy stunts, to present the service-ducking former National Guardsman as the soldiers’ friend. But though Republicans enjoy widespread military support, Bill Clinton was the only president of the last four to cut weapons programs instead of veteran benefits.

Then Lindorff notes that the Bush regime:

• Sought to cut $75 a month from the "imminent danger" pay added to soldiers' paychecks when in battle zones.

• Sought to cut by $150 a month the family separation allowance for overseas service as "wasteful and unnecessary."

• Charged injured GIs from Iraq $8 a day for food when they arrived for medical treatment.

The most directly dangerous act by the corporately responsible White House, as Lindorff notes, was "refusing to provide more than 40,000 active-duty troops in Iraq with Kevlar body armor, leaving it up to them and their families to buy this life-saving equipment." Colonel David Hackworth wrote about this disgrace—he called it "Pentagon criminal negligence"—back for the right-wing World Net Daily back in October 2003, long before Don Rumsfeld had his publicized question from a soldier about equipment:

Worried moms and pops are sending vests to their kids in care packages that in other conflicts contained cookies and Kool-Aid.

This one can't be laid at the feet of the doormats in Congress. Hackworth writes:

Congress is about to approve about $65 billion for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Bush & Company haven't included one penny for body armor, even though the cost of the extraordinary security precautions on the president's recent Asian tour would cover a vest for every soldier seconded to the Iraqi sand traps.

For sure, enough cash would be skimmed off that giant pile of taxpayer dough to fix this critical problem if Rummy, General Richard Myers and a few of the Pentagon supply generals were outfitted with obsolete vests and sent off with our serving heroes to patrol the mean streets of Iraq.

The vests would suddenly be exchanged as quickly as Abrams tanks' and Bradley Fighting Vehicles' tracks get replaced—with U.S. plants working three shifts and the heavy tracks then rushed by air to the battlefield.

Does Ferrari make a vest?

Indonesia finally makes the front page in the U.S. Unfortunately, it's not because of Paul Wolfowitz's activities there.

It usually takes either an unnatural disaster like the Iraq Debacle or a natural disaster like a tsunami to get foreign news into most American newspapers. As for TV, forget it, unless you get the satellite feed from CNN International.

As bidness has globalized, U.S. media outlets have actually reduced their overseas bureaus. That trend was noticed by fired CNN reporter Peter Arnett back in 1998 and reiterated in Project Censored's list of the top squelched stories for the year 2000—No. 7: U.S. Media Reduces Foreign Coverage.

Former CNN International stalwart Ralph Begleiter, who used to host the cable channel's World Report, is now a journalism prof in Delaware, fighting the good fight to release photos of U.S. military coffins arriving from the Middle East. My journalism prof, the late John B. Bremner, was somewhat of a right-winger, but not a hidebound one.

Bremner taught me to root out the mumpsimus among us—and inside us.

Now my best journalism guide is the Dacron Republican-Democrat, whose pages will never litter my litter box. The paper's top story back in 1978 (recalled by reader Bill McGraw in a Poynter Institute "Dr. Ink" column) carried this headline: "Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster." The subhead: "Japan Destroyed." Here was the first paragraph of the Dacron paper's story:

Possible tragedy has marred the vacation plans of Miss Frances Bundle and her mother Olive as volcanoes destroyed Japan early today.

This is where Wolfowitz comes in. We can't control natural disasters, like volcanoes that erupt under Indonesia. But we can try to keep an eye on manmade problems overseas, and, by jingo, put them in context. We can also try to keep an eye on who we send to places like Indonesia to talk with their officials, and we can't do that if we don't have reporters on the ground.

Wolfowitz is a former U.S. ambassador to Jakarta under Reagan and a pal of the military there. Naturally, big oil is involved in how we react to the harsh repression by the Indonesian government in its resources-rich Aceh region and elsewhere in the huge archipelago. Miren Gutierrez of Inter Press Service pointed this out in his August 2003 piece "Is Oil Intrinsically Dirty?":

The ties between big oil and political power get too close for comfort. Nowhere are they closer than in the U.S. During the period in which the bribery and the illegal oils swaps took place in Kazakhstan, Vice President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton. Halliburton, the world's biggest provider of oil services, is involved with ExxonMobil and BP in Kazakhstan.

ExxonMobil was sued for complicity in abuses committed by the Indonesian military forces in war-torn Aceh province, where a major natural gas operation is located. But in July 2002, the U.S. State Department urged Judge Louis Oberdorfer to dismiss the case as it could compromise U.S. interests, and discourage the Indonesian government from cooperating with it in the war against terrorism.

I wonder: Is this the same ExxonMobil that just gave $250,000 to help pay for George W. Bush's inaugural next month?

Jim Lobe, also of Inter Press, pointed to Wolfowitz's continued support in 2003 for training Indonesian military officers, even though at the time the military was being being investigated for its role in the killing of two U.S. teachers in West Papua.

Wolfowitz "exerts a profound influence on U.S. policy toward Indonesia," Ben Terrall points out in Indonesia Alert, adding:

This is an extremely unfortunate reality for dissidents, the underprivileged, and other targets of the Indonesian military.

Terrall puts this mumpsimus under a microscope:

According to his official biography, from 1989 to 1993 Wolfowitz was the "principal civilian responsible for strategy, plans, and policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney." Cheney was Bush Senior’s Secretary of Defense at the time of the November 1991 Dili massacre and traveled to Indonesia just a few months later, meeting with Suharto and top military officials. Rather than airing concerns over the slaughter of more than 270 unarmed East Timorese, Cheney reinforced the value of strong relations with the military, saying, "We have in the past worked with the Indonesian armed forces and are eager to continue to do that in the future."

Wolfowitz later addressed queries about General Wiranto’s role in supervising 1999 death squad activity in East Timor by arguing that while Wiranto "may have done bad things in East Timor . . . [he] was the general who commanded the army during the first elections in Indonesian history . . . where the army genuinely played a neutral role." Hence Wiranto should be commended for allowing elections to proceed without opening fire on dissidents.

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer calls Wolfowitz "the intellectual force behind the Iraq invasion." She adds:

Wolfowitz, in an April 2000 essay in the National Interest, described a new era of American dominance—a Pax Americana. He wrote that U.S. leadership would entail "demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of . . . and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so."

More unnatural disasters are on the horizon.

Eager to boost their own morale and get some positive p.r. during a usually slow news period, SecDef Don Rumsfeld and POTUS George W. Bush turned to the very people their disastrous policies have put in the most danger: their soldiers.

Rumsfeld scrambled to Iraq on Xmas Eve to talk with beleaguered Americans still shaken by the messy mess-tent bombing. Meanwhile, Bush's handlers at Camp David let their fingers do the walking and their puppet do the talking: Borrowing a fashion tip from SCTV's Fireside Chats, they dressed the president in one of Mayor Tommy Shanks's sweaters, sat him down for a picture, and had him chat to selected GIs by phone (see photo).

Meanwhile, the words of the Bush regime's third wise man, Paul Wolfowitz, resonate. Set the Wayback Machine to March 24, 2003: Wolfowitz is being interviewed by the BBC during the invasion of Iraq. Asked about the U.S. "preparation for what comes after," Wolfowitz replies:

"The focus has got to be on removing this criminal regime. Until the regime is gone it's going to be very hard to do anything. Even in cities that are liberated. I think when the people of Basra no longer feel the threat of that regime, you are going to see an explosion of joy and relief."

Fast forward to April 21, 2004, when five car bombs exploded simultaneously in Basra during rush-hour traffic, killing dozens of people, including 20 children. Exactly how many Iraq civilians died isn't known because, as General Tommy Franks noted, "We don't do body counts."

Now to the present day, when Tom Ricks reveals in this morning's Washington Post a prominent Army historian's conclusion that the Bush regime had no formal plan for handling Iraq after invading it. Here's how Ricks put it:

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country, and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Major Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

Too bad, because we love to look at the Bush regime's actual documents. Odds are good that they'll show Wolfowitz was correct—he just had the wrong country—when he said: "The focus has got to be on removing this criminal regime."

Santa probably won't bring me National Lampoon alum Anne Beatts for Xmas. It's been 30 years since I first heard of her, and I know her only from afar (that damn order of protection), but I can't say she never writes. In fact, just this fall, she discovered some Children's Letters to Osama, which you can read at Modern Mirth magazine.

Yes, yes, I know. You tsk-tsk that Beatts is being so, so cynical.

This is what's cynical: On December 21, 2001, barely two months after 9/11, George W. Bush welcomed reporters to the Oval Office (see photo). The official White House transcript (a particularly rich document I also used for a Bush Beat item in November) is titled:

President Highlights Administration's First-Year Accomplishments:
Remarks by the President and Mrs. Bush on Showing New Carpet in the Oval Office

Bush is the gift to journalists that just keeps on giving. Until it hurts. Like the following passage from the December 21, 2001, session with reporters:

THE PRESIDENT: But all in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me. We're so grateful to be living in this compound, and I'm grateful to be working in this office. It's a joy to walk in here every morning, realizing that I'm the President of the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
Anything you want to say?

MRS. BUSH: Happy holidays to everybody. Very happy New Year.

THE PRESIDENT: Why don't you say something about the rug?

MRS. BUSH: Do you want to hear more about the rug?

REPORTER: Where was it made?

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Terry. (Laughter.)

MRS. BUSH: It was made, actually, in New York. Edward Fields is the company. I went and watched as it was being made. They have—it was very interesting. They have huge racks the rug is up on, and then they developed this electric needle that sort of looks like a drill, and the yarn is actually sort of painted on with this electric drill.
We took a long time working on the design of it, and the colors. We went back and forth several times with strike-offs on the colors until we got what we liked. I think it's really pretty. They've done a beautiful job.
In late January, we're going to ask everyone who had to do with the Oval Office—Scalamandre, who made the couches and—the fabric on the couches; Brunschwig, the fabric on the drapes; the Drapery House, which is also out of New York, that made them. The museums that loaned these paintings from Texas. Tom Lea's widow, Sarah Lea. W.H.D. Koerner's son, who we found through Joey O'Neill, who loaned that painting to us. So we'll ask you back at that time to meet all the people who had something to do with the decorating of the Oval Office.

REPORTER: Mr. President, can we ask you—

THE PRESIDENT: Sure.

REPORTER: Do you think that perhaps the ceasefires and the talks about possible surrender negotiations gave bin Laden a chance to sneak out of Afghanistan or—

THE PRESIDENT: Ron, I don't know where he is. I haven't heard much from him recently. And—which means he could be in a cave that doesn't have an opening to it anymore, or could be in a cave where he can get out, or may have tried to slither out into neighboring Pakistan. We don't know. But I will tell you this: We're going to find him.

This is the Bush regime. This is the Bush regime on rugs.

As word of mouth about horrendous tortures and a secret CIA interrogation center leaks out of Guantánamo Bay, we're left hungry for more information on the War of Terror. Subway spokesman Jared Fogle may be the only recent visitor to the Pentagon's sunny torture chamber in Cuba who was allowed to circulate freely. Typically, though, he kept everything he learned under wraps.

Last June, probably about the same time that the Israeli flag was being used to torture at least one Muslim captive, people of the chewish persuasion stopped in at the local Subway at Gitmo to see Jared present the Most Inspiring Health Improvement essay contest award to supply manager Rebecca Jeffries (see photo).

Two months later, when the unconstitutionally delayed (and unconstitutional) tribunals of mostly foreign prisoners were launching, the Navy conducted "media training" seminars to remind all Gitmo personnel to keep a lid on things (see photo).

The local rag, the Guantánamo Bay Gazette, carried the warning from Assistant Public Affairs Officer Gabe Puello of an invasion by reporters:

This media presence on board GTMO will be sustained between 10 to 25 days each month until January 2005. Schedules beyond January 2005 have not yet been projected, but with the number of detainees about to be charged with crimes increasing, Puello anticipates media interest in the commissions to be ongoing for some time.

It must be tough to resist chewing the fat about what's going on down there. I mean, what if someone saw some tinpot Torquemada draping an Israeli flag over a Muslim prisoner? And can you imagine how difficult it would be to put a crimp in the Gitmo grapevine after some soldier tells you he stuck a lit cigarette in some Muslim's ear or slapped him upside the head? Puello apparently didn't talk about any of that, but he did tell the Gazette:

"Planning and executing a media-relations strategy that tells the story accurately is critical. The media can be your biggest ally, or your worst nightmare. Media training can prepare you to project a comfortable, competent on-camera image, while providing meaningful messages with confidence and sincerity."

Not too meaningful, of course. But that job has been easier—and the American public has been kept in the dark—by the Pentagon's strict squelching at Gitmo. The Gazette story noted:

All media are required to have a military escort at all times. If media personnel badger or harass you, politely terminate the conversation/interview and contact the NAVBASE Public Affairs Office at 4502/4520.

Once again, those numbers are 4502 and 4520. Call now if you're afraid of reporters.

But you probably won't have to, because reporters who dare go to Gitmo have it rough. Until October 2003, reporters had to sign a goddamn form promising not to ask questions. After protests from news organizations and other groups, the Pentagon relented. Here's how Reporters Without Borders put it in 2003:

U.S. authorities have lifted a ban on journalists asking questions about ongoing investigations when visiting the U.S. military base at Guantánamo. Five journalists flying there from Florida on October 14 were required to sign a form saying only that officials would not answer such questions. In an earlier version last week, three visiting journalists had been obliged to agree not even to ask them.

Guantánamo spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart confirmed the ban had been lifted and said the U.S. military had been "momentarily a bit too conservative" in its intention to "protect the integrity of the investigation and ongoing assessment" at the base. Among the latest group of five journalists were a reporter from the daily Miami Herald and one from Vanity Fair magazine.

The new version of the form still forbids journalists from communicating with or identifying prisoners on pain of losing their accreditation, banning them from taking pictures on which detainees can be identified, recording remarks by them, or covering the transfer of prisoners from one part of the base to another.

Props to the ACLU for its dogged pursuit of the explosive files it released at the beginning of this week. Other watchdogs are also doing great work at trying to shine light on what's happening at Gitmo. A good place for the curious to start with is Global Security.org's Guantánamo Bay page. For grins, check out the Pentagon's official Gitmo site.

Or, the next time Jared comes to your town, promise to buy him a sandwich, but first grill him.

Denying reality even as critically wounded U.S. soldiers were fighting for their lives in a German hospital after the Mosul bombing, General Dick "Quag" Myers acted this afternoon as if he were still on tour with his fellow USO celebrities.

There's no other explanation for the blatant lie the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told an assemblage of reporters at the Pentagon about yesterday's dining-hall bombing in Iraq:

This attack, of course, is the responsibility of insurgents, the same insurgents who attacked on 9/11, the same type of insurgents who attacked in Beirut, the same insurgents who—type of insurgents who attacked the, Khobar Towers, and the list goes on.

Don't bullshit us, General. Don't lump together the Sunni resistance in Iraq—or the Shiite resistance to our occupying troops—with the Saudi hijackers who bombed New York City and the Pentagon.

It was clear from the performance of both Myers and SecDef Don Rumsfeld at the press briefing that they have no friggin' idea how to stanch the flow of U.S. blood. (They don't care about Iraqi blood; if you do, go to Iraq Body Count for the latest scores.)

Myers seems much more comfortable as a celebrity general on tour with the USO (see photos). It's astonishing that he and Rumsfeld still have their jobs.

You'd think that Myers would have already been canned for his attempted coverup of the Abu Ghraib tortures. As was previously reported—and as Nick Turse noted in "The Doctrine of Atrocity," his Voice story last May about institutionalized brutality carried out by U.S. soldiers—Myers tried like hell to keep the public from learning about our abuse of Iraqi citizens. Turse put it this way:

In Iraq, only when the stunning photographs, including one of a prisoner who was apparently threatened with electrical torture, surfaced late last month on network TV did the press take notice in a major way, but even then, CBS News, at the behest of General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held the pictures back for two weeks and only decided to release them when prodded by [Seymour] Hersh's New Yorker article.

The Pentagon is so bankrupt that neocon nabob Doug Feith even banned talk of Abu Ghraib inside the Pentagon itself.

This afternoon, Myers not only disgraced himself with the "same insurgents" canard, but also gave us plenty of reason to worry about what the hell's going to happen next. He talks as if he's making it up as he goes along. Here's what he said about how to prevent such dining-hall massacres in the future:

So the way you prevent this is you win the war against the extremists, and I've talked about that at length myself. And I'm not saying that's a war in a sense that the military can do this, but that's how we do this. We make this kind of extremism, this kind of action, which shows no moral boundaries—because while this was an attack against coalition forces, U.S. forces, and contractors in Mosul, we've seen attacks on children in Baghdad and Iraqi citizens. So the way we prevent this is we win, and that's what we're going to do.

"Moral boundaries"? Please. Like the boundaries we crossed in our sanctioned and unsanctioned torture of ordinary Iraqis? Or John Ashcroft's illegal and immoral roundup of Muslims right here in the U.S.?

Considering that on the home front, the Bush regime is trying to mortgage our future with its Social Security privatization plans, among other schemes, Myers's non-solution "solution" amounts to nothing more than a nebulous "win one for the gyppers" pep talk.

That act qualifies him to lead USO tours full-time.

Just a few days before yesterday's deadly attack on a U.S. mess tent in Mosul, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard "Quag" Myers, the nation's top uniformed military leader, was in the general area, doing his job by hauling around and publicly hosting a USO tour starring the likes of John Elway and Robin Williams.

Nanu-friggin'-nanu. What planet is the Bush regime from?

Myers wasn't only ushering celebrities around Asia on the "chairman's aircraft." He was signing footballs (see photo) for Iraq-bound U.S. troops in Kuwait.

Myers showed he's a take-charge guy—he don't need no machine to sign his name.

At this point in our imperial history, Myers and the other Pentagon dreamers of this nightmare actually expected to be jabbing corncob pipes into their mouths and accepting the surrender signatures of humbled and grateful natives. Instead, the Iraq Debacle, as you can see from the heavy smoke on your TV screens, is turning chronic.

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post says as much this morning in his analysis titled "Precision of Base Attack Worries Military Experts." Increasingly, the establishment U.S. press is getting right to the point about the deadly nonsense of our foreign policy. Here's how Ricks starts his piece:

In April 2003, as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was ending, the Pentagon projected in a formal planning effort that the U.S. military occupation of the country would end this month.

Instead, December 2004 brought one of the deadliest single incidents of the war for U.S. forces. More than 80 casualties were suffered yesterday by U.S. troops, civilian contractors, and Iraqi soldiers when a U.S. base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was blasted at lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon propaganda machine's Jim Garamone, one of the government's permanently embedded reporters, wrote Saturday (December 18) that "reactions were fantastic" to the USO trip by Myers, Elway, Mork, and the other celebrities, who included the unrememberable Blake Clark ("the unintelligible coach in Waterboy") and boss-lookin' Leeann Tweeden:

On the way over to the Middle East, the chairman's aircraft stopped at Shannon, Ireland, to refuel. A planeload of American servicemembers were coming back to the States for rest-and-recuperation leave. As John Elway came out of the ramp from the plane, a lifelong Denver Bronco fan recognized the former quarterback.

"Oh my God, it's John Elway," the sergeant yelled at a volume that could be heard back across the Atlantic Ocean. And he added an expletive when he noticed Williams.

I can think of one, too. Anyway, not even Williams could stop the merriment:

Another soldier spotted Myers. "Are those four stars on his collar?" he asked. Immediately, Myers, Williams, Clark, Elway, and Tweeden were surrounded by a group in desert camouflage. Digital cameras appeared, pads of paper came out, and the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen talked and laughed with the celebrities.

In Kuwait, units preparing to go into Iraq took time from their training to take in the show. At Camp Virginia—named for the site of one of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001—about 3,000 servicemembers packed in around a stage to see the show.

Each show followed the same lineup. Myers was introduced by local commanders. He would take the stage and thank the servicemembers for their contributions. He would turn the proceeding over to Tweeden.

Tweeden—dressed in modified desert camouflage—served as emcee. She spoke about the USO and previous experiences on tours to entertain the troops. Then she would introduce Elway.

The two-time Super Bowl winner spoke about the teams he had been on. Then he told the servicemembers that they were part of an unbeatable team and that he was proud to be affiliated with them. Then Elway proved he could still sling a football, tossing out souvenirs all the way to the edges of the crowds.

After which, the celebrity general would sign the footballs. Mission accomplished.