English Lesson For the Bush Administration

The following is a letter from Erica Verillo, which appeared yesterday’s Boston Globe. It’s well worth sharing:

THE BUSH administration seems to have a serious problem with reality. The most recent reality challenge is the policy of torture in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which the administration is frantically redefining as “abuse,” “excesses,” and “humiliation.” We even have Secretary Rumsfeld describing footage of several American soldiers “having sex” with a female Iraqi prisoner.

Let’s have a little plain English here. “Having sex” with a prisoner is known as “rape.” Systematic beatings are called “torture.” Excesses that lead to death are called “murder.” The hundreds of women and children in mass graves in Fallujah are the product of a “massacre.” Taken together, all of these add up to “atrocities.”

The dissemination of “incomplete information” from “imperfect intelligence” is called “lies.” The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel have reaped in profits are called “war profiteering.” The invasion of Iraq is called “illegal.” The destruction of America’s international standing is called “permanent.” And Texaco/Phillips’s high bid for Iraqi oil is called “why we are in Iraq.”

Amen.

Let’s make no mistakes here. Islamist fundamentalists are bat-shit crazy, and as close to true evil as we’ve seen in a very long time…however, Iraq had NOTHING AT ALL TO DO with the Islamists (who hated the Hussein regime for being too secular) UNTIL Dubya and his cronies decided to hand them a jihad on a silver platter. Think of that the next time we see a video of an American being slowly decapitated….oh, and maybe give some thought as to why we didn’t hear a drop of outrage from any media outlet or grandstanding politician in this country when the same thing happened to Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian, on April 14th.