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Ninety-eight percent of all animal species are invertebrates, and the majority are to be found on the North American continent.

Three days in and it’s started already. The vampires of Fox News, the rabid dogs of Republican talk radio, are already joining forces in a desperate attempt to bring the Obama presidency into disrepute.

According to a balding vampire bat hanging in its cave somewhere amidst the Fox News studios, and known when it assumes human form as Bill O’Reilly, American families are in danger because President Obama has signed an order to close the torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.

NBC Nightly News echoed those sentiments tonight with a long-winded segment suggesting that Abdulsalam Ghaithan Mureef al-Shehri, until 2006 a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, had been released only to once again take up with al Qaeda, thus threatening the very fabric of American society.

NBC Nightly News, while doing its utmost to instill doubt into the minds of Americans concerning President Obama’s decision to close the Cuba-based detention center, totally failed to mention that al-Shehri had been released into the custody of one of America’s foremost allies, Saudi Arabia, which had failed to constrain al-Shehri and prevent him from rejoining the terrorist organization. Saudi Arabia was a close confidant of the Bush administration, and the nation that spawned at least eleven of the 9/11 hijackers.

Meanwhile, Republican talk radio, in the guise of the super-moronic and admitted drug-addict, Rush Limbaugh, stated yesterday that he hoped President Obama would fail.

Pause a moment to think deeply about that statement.

Is this the admission of a true US patriot? Limbaugh hopes the President of the United States fails, and by association he hopes his country fails, simply because his party lost the election.

America, you are a nation of failures. You are a nation of failures because you allow such poison to flow unhindered. You are a failure as a community, as a country, as a nation.

Is this really your idea of freedom, America, when those you choose as your political mentors seek the failure of your newly-elected leader, and by consequence the failure of your nation, just because he wears the wrong colored shirt?

You make a mockery of Freedom, America. You hold it up, not as a beacon of Liberty to the world, but as a quarterback’s shirt in a tuppenny-halfpenny football game.

Frankly, if I were Barack Obama, I’d tell you all to go to Hell for allowing such scum to dominate your media. I’d take my family and move somewhere where decency and morality were honestly admired as genuine human traits.

The Dis-United States of America – truly a land of invertebrates.

Filed under: Limp and flaccid

US President Barack Obama today signed the order that will see the demise of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center within one year.

It’s an order that should never have needed to be signed; a relic of the Bush administration’s policies of torture and imprisonment without trial, once only the political playthings of South American banana republics and Third World African dictators.

The practicalities of closing Guantanamo are legion. 243 detainees need to go somewhere, and for many, their countries of origin are known human rights abusers. No charges have been leveled at the majority of these prisoners; no court of law has found them guilty of any crime.

A small group – less than twenty – are considered “too dangerous for release”, yet they cannot be tried in federal courts because…….well, according to NBC Nightly News tonight, “evidence against them cannot be revealed because it remains top secret.”

Apparently, the truth had to be distorted slightly as the sensitivities of anchor, Brian Williams, weren’t up to telling the complete story.

According to President Obama, “We cannot try these people because of various problems related to evidence.”

That’s somewhat more accurate than NBC’s blatant misinformation, though still intentionally vague.

The truth is clear cut. Confessions from these prisoners – including Khalil Sheik Mohammed – were obtained under torture. Khalil Sheik Mohammed “confessed” to over thirty terrorist plots against the US, though truly, who’s to say he was involved in any of them?

The Bush administration wanted this man pilloried for the 9/11 attacks. Their inability – or, was it reluctance? – to apprehend Osama bin Laden, meant a substitute was required. Khalil Sheik Mohammed fitted the bill perfectly, and would have been happy to oblige the US by dying on a gurney, a martyr, in front of the world’s press.

It’s now unlikely he, or any of the other ‘dangerous prisoners’, will die of anything other than old age. Until then, their most likely resting place will be a US military prison – Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, or the Charleston Naval Brig in South Carolina.

Unless, that is, certain Republican members of Congress get their way; among them, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, who’s quite certain he knows of no-one in California, Kansas, or South Carolina, who would want any of these terrorists, “….living down the street.”

Obviously, Senator Bond and the American people have even less faith in US security, than have I.

For all of President Obama’s good intentions, it would seem the US is to continue its policy of imprisonment without trial, at least, so far as these ‘dangerous’ detainees are concerned. What a terrible indictment of a superpower, that its judicial system can be permanently hog-tied by a corrupt administration; one that, through its actions, has placed an impossible burden on its successors.

There may well be around twenty detainees at Guantanamo Bay who are too dangerous to release, but both the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the US Bill of Rights grant the right of trial by jury, and forbid punishment without due process of law, plus other rights accepted, not just in the United States, but in most ‘civilized’ nations.

George W Bush and his administration chose to ignore the Bill of Rights, stating detainees were ‘foreign combatants’, and not covered by the law. Neither were they prisoners of war, so, conveniently, the Geneva Conventions didn’t protect them, either.

In other words, they had no rights or protection whatever. They could be used, abused, tortured, and beaten without recourse to any law.

It was a mark of the man, that George W Bush could command an administration so cold-bloodedly cruel that it ranked with the perpetrators of 9/11. Its aftermath requires President Obama to continue a policy surely abhorrent to him. He must authorize the internment of a group of individuals, for the rest of their lives, without trial.

Would justice not be mollified, at least to some degree, if George W Bush, and the other political perpetrators of this obscene judicial mess, kept company with Khalil Sheik Mohammed and his companions during their lifetime sojourn in a United States military prison?

Filed under: Crimes against America

“Goodbye; Good Riddance, George W Bush.”

That headline has graced Sparrow Chat for the whole of today, January 20th 2009, the day Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

George W Bush has gone. He left office, vacated the White House, and if anyone cares where he is now, most likely he’s in Texas.

Someone should care where he is. In fact, if the FBI are not keeping very close tabs on the now ex-president, they’re certainly not doing their job. Having war criminals on the loose in a nation whose new leader has just announced ‘a new morality’, hardly rings true, now does it?

There are few who can doubt the sincerity of Barack Obama, but when he talks of “moving America forward”, and, “a new era of responsibility”, one has to wonder how making reparation for the last eight years will fit into his plans.

There are many in America who would prefer the horrors enacted by George W Bush’s administration to be swept under the political carpet. After all, apart from the dire economic crisis that Bush obviously considered had nothing whatever to do with his policies, judging from his last press conference –

“I believe this — the phrase “burdens of the office” is overstated. You know, it’s kind of like, why me? Oh, the burdens, you know. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch? It’s just — it’s pathetic, isn’t it, self-pity.”

– the American people were barely inconvenienced by the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina only really effected poor black people.

Renditions, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping, imprisonment without trial, waterboarding, and all the other forms of torture that were dispensed without our knowledge, at worst, only mildly inconvenienced US citizens – unless their name happened to be Jose Padilla, of course.

So, let’s move on. Bush is history. Why keep raking up the past? After all, they did attack us on 9/11.

Who did? The Iraqis? No. Ninety percent of the Bush administration’s war crimes were not committed against terrorists but on innocent individuals, who were just going about their business until the US war machine rolled over them and ruined, butchered, or lost them, their lives.

Americans are quick to forget, and forgive, the criminal acts of their leaders. Richard Nixon was the perfect example of that. In the case of George W Bush and his cohorts, however, the rest of the world will neither forgive, nor forget. If Barack Obama expects to be able to win over those outside the United States, while making no effort to clean up the mess left behind in his own back yard, he’ll be in for a rude awakening.

On this Inauguration Day, what stuck in the craw was the apparent chumminess of Obama and Bush. Of course, it could all be charade on the part of Obama – etiquette has to be adhered to – but if the new president is to be successful there is no room for further palling around with those responsible for bringing the greatest power on earth to its knees, both morally and economically.

The future is bright. The future is……Obama?

We’ll have to wait and see.

Filed under: Justice