Bush Gets Testy About Torture

[RBHam]

Awwww. All those torture questions are getting on Junior's nerves!


June 14, 2004

Waffle and Swagger at the G-8
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
By BRUCE JACKSON

President Bush held a rare press conference on Friday, June 10, after the G8 conference in Sea Island, Georgia. He wanted to talk about how successful the meeting was, which it wasn't. Earlier in the week the UN endorsed the new Iraqi interim government, which Bush hoped to follow with commitments of resources from other members of the G8, but nobody offered any more troops or money. Last year Bush told the world that the US was willing to go on this crusade alone, and, with the exception of Great Britain, Italy, and the few other members in the Coalition of the Killing, the rest of the world seems content to let that condition continue.

Reporters at the press conference were more interested in Bush's involvement in the growing torture scandal than the failed G-8. One brought it up and Bush said he told people to behave legally. He didn't address the question, which had to do with his administration's interpretation of "legal" behavior in such matters. Some other reporters asked other questions, then a second reporter tried to pin him down on if and when he'd authorize torture. He again said he'd stay within the law. A couple of slowball questions came along and then a third reporter said that his legal advisers seem to have concluded that torture was permissible, so the real question went not to interpretations of laws but the morality of torture. The born-again-redeemed-loved-by-God Bush wouldn't go there at all. His answer was addled and testy.

It was European reporters who seemed most interested in pressing Bush on the torture issue, and who were not at all impressed with his continuing assertions that he was telling people to act in terms of the law. Bush has no knowledge of history, but European reporters do, and all of them at the G-8 press conference were no doubt aware how assiduously Hitler got laws passed to authorize everything he did. Hitler's government and its actions were all legal; it was a defect in moral vision that undergirded their atrocities.

more...

http://www.counterpunch.org/jackson06142004.html

edited out weird stuff