Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.
Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.
Oddly, mainstream media are ignoring this alarming revelation that Bush may have been half-cracked when he started his Iraq war. My own paper, The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is the only U.S. newspaper to report it so far. Canada’s Toronto Star recounted the story, calling it a “stranger-than-fiction disclosure … which suggests that apocalyptic fervor may have held sway within the walls of the White House.” Fortunately, online commentary sites are spreading the news, filling the press void.
The French revelation jibes with other known aspects of Bush’s renowned evangelical certitude. For example, a few months after his phone call to Chirac, Bush attended a 2003 summit in Egypt. The Palestinian foreign minister later said the American president told him he was “on a mission from God” to defeat Iraq. At that time, the White House called this claim “absurd.”
Recently, GQ magazine revealed that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attached warlike Bible verses and Iraq battle photos to war reports he hand-delivered to Bush. One declared: “Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”
It’s awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who “got saved.” He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.
For six years, Americans really haven’t known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn’t in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq’s oil—or to protect Israel—or to complete Bush’s father’s vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.
Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.
Some bullshit: think always positive, political correctness, let’s do something also it is wrong ... yawn....
Bush will soon be on his way out, but rest assured that his replacement will be a clone; or, as it is now starting to look, ‘a Bush in drag’, says Ben Tanosborn.
America, more than anything else, more than the proverbial land of opportunity, is very definitely something else. This nation of ours appears to be, first and foremost, a land of contradictions where, while the polls indicate most people feel the nation is being led in the wrong direction, we seem inclined to follow the same pied piper foreign policy.
Like it or not, in the US you cease to be an American (or rather, a “good American”) in the mind of your family, friends and neighbors the moment you deny the sacred dogma of inerrancy in US foreign policy. It may seem irrational to some people – either the statement on its face or what it’s implied by it – but deep inside that is the attitudinal belief of a vast majority of Americans I know and, I would venture to guess, most Americans anyone might know. And yet, that “patriotic majority,” so similar to me to the “moral majority” of time past, prefer not to think of themselves in any way, shape or form as nativists, jingoists, or otherwise exclusionary… convinced they are just down-to-earth regular folks: Main Street America.
Shortly after 9/11, political America – Democrats and Republicans – decided that it was about time to set aside their minute differences in foreign policy and act as a true united front. After all, they could always maintain some semblance of independence in the domestic arena, keeping a presumed differentiation alive and well… as if the gross mislabeling of the conservative and liberal captions defined how either party stood.
To our national detriment, including America’s standing in the world, such unnecessary and unwarranted united front was adopted by our political duopoly without as much as the blink of an eye; its ideas quickly permeating, and finding acceptance, through much of the citizenry of Main Street America. That citizen’s consent to relinquish rights and freedoms, giving blind permission, authorization, license and sanction allowing Bush’s White House to do as it pleased – all too often in open acts of criminality – has made it starkly clear that even if we claim to live under democratic rule, a so-called rule of law, our republic operates under a much different rule: the rule of consentership. And we, the citizenry, are simply the consenters! Such role reversal has made Americans the doting citizens of their uncle, Sam, an embarrassingly felonious uncle at that.
Let’s stop being hypocrites! Let’s stop blaming Bush for our own cowardice and lack of civic guts. Empowering a selected – not elected – government; granting clearance for the neocons to act; giving Bush the green light to invade Iraq; tolerating the usurping of our rights and freedoms; and going along with blatant economic malfeasance that is sure to bankrupt this nation, is unmistakably defining the highest level of consentership: what some of us would call the ultimate political pass.
Could it be that we are consenting because that is exactly what we want? That deep inside we know that someone needs to do the dirty work on our behalf, and that there needs to be a price paid? Are we really accomplices as much as we are consenters? Isn’t this a form of a dictatorship by that antidemocratic triumvirate that rules our lives: predatory capitalism, wasteful consumerism, and religious fundamentalism?
It’s beginning to look as if in early 2008, consentership will continue to dominate our Tweedledum-Tweedledee politics with Republicans and Democrats achieving renewed solidarity in foreign affairs, be it the forever-occupation (or negotiated presence) of Iraq, a non-stop continuing demonization of Iran and other “terror-villains,” or the constant denunciation of any nation that challenges our imperial hegemony and right to collect tribute in any way we see fit. Bush will soon be on his way out, but rest assured that his replacement will be a clone; or, as it is now starting to look, “a Bush in drag.” Perhaps we continue to be led astray with the promise of a lesser evil approach in domestic governance, but it will not be a lesser evil in the areas that are essential to bring trusting understanding among peoples of the world; it will not be a recipe to achieve peace on this earth, just as the organic compounds were to achieve life.
Of late, we have been looking at what is happening in Greater Russia, and are totally befuddled by the confrontational attitude of Mr. Putin. A man that not so long ago our own Duce, after looking into his eyes, tabbed as his straightforward, trustworthy friend Vladimir. My God, can someone explain how our prophetic, infallible Bush was able to get a sense of Putin’s soul and just a few years later have him turn against us?
But we shouldn’t fret over Putin’s reaction to our accustomed imperialist behavior, nor should we be surprised at his popularity in Greater Russia. Just like here in the US, there is also an apparent consensus in the neo-czarist land of Vladimir Putin, with an overwhelming majority matching their consentership against our very own. If we can be bipartisan in adopting – preserving might be a more appropriate word – an imperial foreign policy, it’s understandable that the Russians’ newly found economic success and national pride have turned their political behavior into one of consentership. The US should not expect anything better after our “screw-you” behavior during their cold turkey exit from communism, and now our insolence of trying to park missiles at their borders.
Consentership may not be dangerously consequential for small groups or nations that have no influence beyond their memberships or borders. For an imperial superpower it can turn out to be the most extreme among political extremes, perhaps the worst form of dictatorship. After all, we are consenting to the rule of a very few… and those few have been granted the power to push the nuclear button at will, to turn daylight into permanent night.
And we have the gall to criticize some nations because we tag them as dictatorships!
11/16/07 “McClatchy”—--- WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
America has become a haven for the world’s war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. There’s been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national.
“This is unacceptable. Our laws must change and our determination to end this shameful situation must become a priority,” Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, said at a hearing of the subcommittee Wednesday.
He’s trying to get more information about specific cases.
One is that of Juan Romagoza Arce, the director of a clinic that provides free care for the poor in Washington. In 1980, Romagoza was a young doctor caring for the poor in El Salvador during the early period of his country’s civil war when the military seized him and tortured him for 22 days. An estimated 75,000 people died in the 12-year war.
Romagoza told Durbin that he was given electric shocks until he lost consciousness, then kicked and burned with cigarettes until he came to. He also told of being sodomized, nearly asphyxiated in a hood containing calcium oxide — which can cause severe shortness of breath when inhaled — and subjected to waterboarding, including being hung by his feet with his head immersed in water until he nearly drowned.
Romagoza and two other torture victims brought a civil suit in U.S. federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., against two Salvadoran generals who moved to Florida in 1989: Jose Guillermo Garcia, who was the minister of defense, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was the director general of the Salvadoran National Guard.
In 2002, a jury found them liable for the torture of the three, and a judgment of $54.6 million was entered against them and upheld on appeal.
Romagoza said he didn’t expect to see any of the money.
He testified that he’d received many threatening phone calls and letters at the time of the trial but that he’d overcome his fears and testified.
“I felt like I was in the prow of a boat and that there were many people rowing behind that were moving me into this moment,” he told Durbin’s panel. “I felt that if I looked back at them I’d weep, because I’d see them again, wounded, tortured, raped, naked, torn and bleeding. So I didn’t look back, but I felt their support, their strength and their energy.”
He said he and others were angry and frustrated that the two men “live in the same country where we have found refuge from their persecution.”
Durbin said he’d send a letter asking the U.S. attorney in South Florida what was being done in the case.
“If he says he doesn’t have authority, we should change the law. If he has the authority and is not using it, we should change the U.S. attorney,” Durbin said.
Durbin and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., have introduced legislation that would authorize the government to prosecute anyone found in the U.S. who’s guilty of genocide, human trafficking or recruiting child soldiers.
David Scheffer is a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration. He testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, “one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts — criminal and military — to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. . . .
“That, however, is not the case.”
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NOV. 14
The date of Wednesday’s hearing is significant in the history of war crimes, Justice Department official Sigal P. Mandelker told the subcommittee:
On Nov. 14, 1935, the Third Reich issued regulations that deprived Germany’s Jews of their citizenship and established a system to classify people as Jews based on their ancestry and affiliations.
On Nov. 14, 1945, the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg, Germany, to try Nazi leaders.
On Nov. 14, 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued its first indictments on genocide charges over the massacres of as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Two of the leaders indicted, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain fugitives.