Analysis - Middle East 7.14.07
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i am new here and do freelance work, anyone interested contact theworldartist@yahoo.com

 Before the Hurricane

In the Reagan Administration, there was a concerted effort to get FEMA out of the disaster business, shifting the responsibility to local and state government. If you do some research of a FEMA conference at University of Miami in mid-eighties, you will learn what the new mission was to be. In 2001, Bush wanted to pick up where Reagan left off. Joe Albaugh, a Bush friend and campaign manager, took over FEMA and said FEMA should scale back its activities and leave disasters primarily to state and local government. He said the agency was "n oversized entitlement program" and said states should reply on faith-based organizations ...like the Salvation Army." Later, when Bush hugged the two distraught women in Louisiana, all he could say was that the Salvation Army would attend to their needs.

While George W. Bush was lecturing the international community about human rights and democracy, his CIA was flying detainees into Uzbekistan where cooperatives Uzbecs helped extract information by the "immersion of limbs in boiling liquid" and by "drowning and suffocation."

Craig Murray is now the former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was suspended and then removed after a memorandum he sent to the Foreign Office was leaked. In it he complained that information gathered from tortured prisoners in Uzbekistan was being relayed by the U.S. to Great Britain and that it could be used to jail people in the United Kingdom. By accepting such information, he told his superiors "we are selling our souls for dross."

Okay, I thought we had gone over the top with the recent remarks by former First Lady Barbara Bush (AKA Cruella DeBabs) about the relocation of the evacuees "working out very well" for them, but this may have set a new low.

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

By Lisa Rosetta

The Salt Lake Tribune
Firefighters endure a day of FEMA training, which included a course on sexual harassment. Some firefighters say their skills are being wasted. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

Here's the money shot: check the last paragraph:

"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

In December, 2005, it will have been three years since Osama bin Laden slipped escaped from Tora Bora. Over the next three years the master terrorist has remained at large, and the Bush administration has gone long periods without mentioning him. On the other hand, it constantly invokes 9-11 to justify its policies and frequently leaves the impression that the war in Iraq is intended to extract revenge for 9-11.

During the 2004 campaign, George Bush and Dick Cheney repeatedly denied that the US knew Bin Laden was at Tora Bora. General Tommy Franks, campaigning for them, dished out the same misinformation. In March, 2005, the Pentagon was forced to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request and acknowledge that it knew that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora in late 2001.

The Bush administration’s efforts to limit the appearance of dissent at its political functions is a serious threat to our democratic processes. During the campaign of 2000, the Bush campaign carefully screened non Republicans from their rallies. This is perfectly legal and has a precedent in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, but it is hardly democratic. It represents an effort to convey the impression that few if any strongly disagree with George W. Bush. Perhaps it represents effective media management, but strikes a blow against the basic concept that democracy requires an open public forum.